Typhoon

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TYPHOON

■HE SEA, WITH A FLOOR

TYPHOON

By

JOSEPH CONRAD

Garden Citt Nxw Yobx:

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY

1918

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• •

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Cofyrighi, tgaa, hy

DOUBLEDAYi PAGE & COICPANT

AU rights resenedj imduding tkai ef

iransUUum kiloforngi^ languages ^

including the Scandinaman

1

V?

1

ILLUSTRATIONS

^ A faint burst of lightning quivered all
around, as if flashed into a black
and secret chamber of the sea, with
a floor of foaming crests **

Frontispiece

'<- ***A11 you have to do is to take care

that they don't hoist the elephant
upside-down "* . . . • i6

**At that moment Captain Mac Whirr
crossed the deck, umbrella in hand,
escorted by a Chinaman who also
carried an umbrella " . • .18

** The sun, pale and without rays, poured
a leaden heat and the Chinamen
were lying prostrate about the
decks" 36

^The little brass wheel in his hands

seemed a bright and fragile toy" . 126

* He and Jukes looked at each other " 148

• *« 'V * W

Typhoon

CAPTAIN MacWHIRR of the
steamer Nan*Shan had a physio-
gnomy that, in the order of material ap-
pearances, was the exact counterpart of
his mind ; it presented no marked charac*
teristics of firmness or stupidity; it had
no pronounced characteristics whatever:
it was simply ordinary, irresponsive, and
unruffled.

The only thing his aspect might have
been said to suggest, at times, was bash-
fulness; because he would sit, in business
offices ashore, sunburnt and smiling
faintly, with downcast eyes. When he
raised them they were perceived to be di-
rect in their glance and of blue colour.

2 Typhoon

His hair was fair and extremely fine,
clasping from temple to temple the bald
dome of his skull in a clamp as of fluffy
silk. The hair of his face, on the con-
trary, carroty and flaming, resembled a
growth of copper wire clipped short to the
line of the Up ; while, no matter how close
he shaved, fiery metallic gleams passed,
when he moved his head, over the surface
of his cheeks. He was rather below the
medium height, a bit round-shouldered,
and so sturdy of limb that his clothes al-
ways looked a shade too tight for his arms
and legs. As if unable to grasp what is
due to the difference of latitudes, he wore
a brown bowler hat, a complete suit of a
brownish hue, and clumsy black boots.
These harbour togs gave to his thick fig-
ure an air of stiff and uncouth smartness.
A thin silver watch-chain looped his
waistcoat, and he never left his ship for
the shore without clutching in his power-
ful hairy fist an elegant umbrella of the
very best quality, but generally unrolled.

Typhoon 3

Young Jukes, the chief mate, attending
his commander to the gangway, would
sometimes venture to say with the great-
est gentleness: ** Allow me, sir" — and,
possessing himself of the umbrella defer-
entially, would elevate the ferule, shake
the folds, twirl a neat furl in a jiffy, and
hand it back ; going through the perform-
ance with a face of such portentous
gravity that Mr, Solomon Rout, the
chief-engineer, smoking his morning cigar
over the skylight, would turn away his
head in order to hide a smile. "Oh!
Aye ! The blessed gamp. . , . Thank
'ee. Jukes, thank *ee," would mutter
Captain MacWhirr heartily, without
looking up.

Having just enough imagination to
carry him through each successive day,
and no more, he was tranquilly sure of
himself, and from the very same cause he
was not in the least conceited. It is your
imaginative superior who is touchy, over-
bearing, and difficult to please: but every

4 Typhoon

ship Captain Mac Whirr commanded was
the floating abode of harmony and peace.
It was, in truth, as impossible for him to
take a flight of fancy as it would be for a
watch-maker to put together a chronome-
ter with nothing except a two-pound
hammer and a whip-saw in the way of
tools. Yet the uninteresting lives of men
so entirely given to the actuality of the
bare existence have their mysterious side.
It was impossible in Captain MacWhirr's
case, for instance, to understand what
under heaven could have induced that
perfectly satisfactory son of a petty grocer
in Belfast to run away to sea. And yet
he had done that very thing at the age of
fifteen. It was enough, when you thought
it over, to give you the idea of an im-
mense, potent, and invisible hand thrust
into the ant-heap of the earth, laying hold
of shoulders, knocking heads together,
and setting the unconscious faces of the
multitude towards inconceivable goah
and in undreamt-of directions.

Typhoon 5

His father never really forgave him for
this undutiful stupidity. "We could have
got on without him/' he used to say, later
on; "but there 's the business. And he
an only son, too ! " His mother wept very
much after his disappearance. As it had
never occurred to him to leave word be-
hind, he was mourned over for dead till,
after eight months, his first letter arrived
from Taleahuano. It was short and con-
tained the statement, "We had very fine
weather on our passage out." But evid-
ently, in the writer's mind, the only im-
portant intelligence was to the effect that
his Captain had, on the very day of writ-
ing, entered him regularly on the ship's
articles as Ordinary Seaman. "Because
I can do the work," he explained. The
mother again wept copiously, while the re-
mark, "Tom *s an ass," expressed the
emotions of the father. He was a corpu-
lent man, with a gift for sly chaffing,
which to the end of his life he exer-
cfsed in his intercourse with his son, a

6 Typhoon

little pityingly, as if upon a half-witted
person.

MacWhirr's visits to his home were
necessarily rare, and in the course of years
he despatched other letters to his parents,
informing them of his succcessive promo-
tions and of his movements upon the vast
earth. In these missives could be found
sentences like this: "The heat here is
very great"; or, **0n Xmas day at 4
P.M. we fell in with some icebergs." The
old people became ultimately acquainted
with a good many names of ships and
with the names of the skippers who com-
manded them, with the names of Scotch
and English shipowners, with the names
of seas, oceans, straits, promontories;
with outlandish names of lumber-ports, of
rice-ports, of cotton-ports ; with the names
of islands; with the name of their son's
young woman. She was called Lucy. It
did not suggest itself to him to mention
whether he thought the name pretty.
And then they died.

Typhoon 7

The great day of Mac Whirr's marriage
came in due course, following shortly
upon the great day when he got his first
command. All these events had taken
place many years before the morning
when,* in the chart-room of the steamer
Nan-Shan^ he stood confronted by the fall
of a barometer he had no reason to dis-
trust. The fall — taking into account the
excellence of the instrument, the time of
the year, and the ship's position on the
terrestrial globe — ^was of a nature omin-
ously prophetic, but the red face of the
man betrayed no sort of inward disturb-
ance. Omens were as nothing to him,
and he was unable to discover the mes-
sage of a prophecy till the fulfilment
had brought it home to his very door.
"That *s a fall and no mistake," he
thought. "There must be some uncom-
monly dirty weather knocking about/*

n

THE Nan-Shan was on her way from
the southward to the treaty port of
Fu-chau with some cargo in her lower
holds and two hundred Chinese coolies
returning to their village homes in the
province of Fo-Kien, after a few years of
work in various tropical colonies. The
morning was fine, the oily sea heaved
without a sparkle, and there was a queer
white, misty patch in the sky like a halo
of the sun. The fore-deck, packed with
Chinamen, was full of sombre clothing, yel-
low faces, and pigtails, and sprinkled over
with a good many naked shoulders, for
there was no wind, and the heat was close.
The coolies lounged, talked, smoked, or
stared over the rail ; some, drawing water
over the side, sluiced each other ; a few

viept on hatches, while several small part*

d

Typhoon 9

ies of six sat on their heels, surrounding
iron trays with plates of rice and tiny
teacups; and every single Celestial of
them was carrying with him all he had in
the world — a wooden chest with a ringing
lock and brass on the corners, containing
the savings of his labour : some clothes of
ceremony, sticks of incense, a little opium
maybe, bits of nameless rubbish of con-
ventional value, and a small hoard of sil-
ver dollars, toiled for in coal-lighters, won
in gambling-houses or in petty trading,
grubbed out of earth, sweated out in
mines, on railway lines, in deadly jungle,
under heavy burdens — amassed patiently,
guarded with care, cherished fiercely.

A cross swell had set in from the direc-
tion of Formosa channel about ten o'clock
without disturbing these passengers
much, because the Nan-SAan, with her
flat bottom, rolling chocks on bilges, and
great breadth of beam, had a reputation of
an exceptionally steady ship in a seaway.
Mr. Jukes, in moments of expansior

lo Typhoon

on shore, would proclaim loudly that
the "old girl was as good as she was
pretty." It would never have occurred
to Captain MacWhirr to express his fav-
ourable opinion so loud or in terms so
fanciful.

She was a good ship, undoubtedly, and
not old, either. She had been built in
Dumbarton less than three years before
to the order of a firm of merchants in
Siam — Messrs. Sigg & Son. When she
lay afloat, finished in every detail and
ready to take up the work of her life, the
builders contemplated her with pride.
''Sigg has asked us for a reliable skipper
to take her out," remarked one of the
partners; and the other, after reflecting
for a while, said: ''I think MacWhirr is
ashore just at present."

"Is he? Then wire him at once. He 's
the very man," declared the senior, with-
out a moment's hesitation.

Next morning, MacWhirr stood before
them unperturbed, having travelled from

Typhoon

I

y

London by the midnight express, after a
sudden but undemonstrative parting with
his wife. She was the daughter of a su-
perior couple who had seen better days.

** We had better be going together over
the ship, Captain/' said the senior part-
ner ; and the three men started to explore
the perfections of the Nan-Shan from
stem to stern and from keelson to the
trucks of her two stumpy pole-masts.
Captain MacWhirr had begun by taking
ofiF his coat, which he hung on the end of
a steam-windlass embodying all the latest
improvements.

"My uncle wrote of you favourably by
yesterday's mail to our good friends,
Messrs. Sigg, you know; and doubtless
they '11 continue you out there in com-
mand," said the junior. "You '11 be able
to boast of being in charge of the handiest
boat of her size on the coast of China,
Captain," he added.

"Have you? Thank 'ee," mumbled
vaguely MacWhirr, to whom the view of

V

12 Typhoon

a distant eventuality could appeal no more
than the beauty of a wide landscape to a
purblind tourist ; and his eyes happening
at the moment to be at rest upon the lock
of the cabin door, he walked up to it, full
of purpose, and began to rattle the handle
vigorously, while he observed in his low
earnest voice: **You can't trust the work-
men nowadays. A brand new lock, and it
won't act at all. Stuck fast. See? See? "

As soon as they found themselves alone
in their office across the yard: '*You
praised that fellow up to Sigg. What is
it you see in him?" asked the nephew,
with faint contempt.

"I admit he has nothing of your fancy
skipper about him, if that's what you
mean," said the elder man, curtly. "Is
the foreman of the joiners on the Nan-
Shan outside? — Come in. Bates. How is
it that you let Tait's people put us off
with a defective lock on the cabin door?

The Captain could see directly he set eye
on it. Have it replaced at once. The

Typhoon 13

little straws. Bates; the little straws.**
The lock was replaced accordingly, and a
few days afterwards the Nan^Shan
steamed out to the East without Mac-
Whirr having offered any further remark
as to her fittings, or having been heard to
utter a single word hinting at pride in his
ship, gratitude for his appointment, or
satisfaction at his prospects.

With a temperament neither loquacious
nor taciturn, he found very little occasion
to talk. There were matters of duty, of
course, — directions, orders, and so on, but
the past being to his mind done with, and
the future not there yet, the more general
actualities of the day required no com-
ment, because facts can speak for them*
selves with overwhelming precision. /

Old Mr. Sigg liked a man of few words,
and one that "you could be sure would
not try to improve upon his instructions."
MacWhirr, satisfying these requirements,
was continued in command of the Nan-
Shan^ and applied himself to the carefuJ

14 Typhoon

navigation of his ship in the China sea&
She had come out on a British register,
but, after some time, Messrs. Sigg judged
it expedient to transfer her to the Siamese
flag.

At the news of the contemplated trans-
fer, Jukes grew restless, as if under a sense
of personal affront. He went about grum-
bling to himself and uttering short, scorn-
ful laughs. "Fancy having a ridiculous
Noah's-ark elephant in the ensign of one's
ship," he said once at the engine-room
door. "Dash me if I can stand it. I '11
throw up the billet. Don't it makej^ou
sick, Mr. Rout?" The chief-engineer
only cleared his throat with the air of a
man who knows the value of a good billet.

The first morning the new nag floated
over the stem of the Nan-SAan, Jukes
stood looking at it bitterly from the
bridge. He struggled with his feelings
for a while, and then remarked: "Queer
flag for a man to sail under, sir."

"What 's tjxe matter with the flag? " in-

Typhoon 15

quired Captain Mac Whirr. "Seems all
right to me." And he walked across to
the end of the bridge to have a good look.

**Well, it is queer to me," burst out
Jukes, greatly exasperated, and flung off
the bridge.

Captain Mac Whirr was amazed at these
manners. After a while he stepped
quietly into the chart-room and opened
his International Signal Code-Book at the
place where the flags of all the nations are
correctly figured in gaudy rows. He ran
his finger over them, and when he came
to Siam he contemplated with great at-
tention the red field and the white ele-
phant. Nothing could be more simple;
but to make sure he brought the book out
on the bridge for the purpose of compar-
ing the coloured drawing with the real
thing at the flagstaff astern. When next
Jukes, who was carrying on the duty that
day with a sort of suppressed fierceness,
happened on the bridge his commander
observed :

i6 Typhoon

''There 's nothing amiss with that flag. "

"Is n't there?" mumbled Jukes, falling
on his knees before a deck-locker and
jerking therefrom viciously a spare lead-
line.

'*No. I looked up the book. Length
twice the breadth and the elephant ex-
actly in ther middle. I thought the peo-
ple ashore would know how to make the
local flag. Stands to reason. You were
wrong, Jukes."

**Well, sir," began Jukes, getting up
excitedly, **all I can say — " He fumbled
for the end of the coil of line with trem-
bling hands.

"That 's all right." Captain Mac-
Whirr soothed him, sitting heavily on
a little canvas folding stool he greatly
affected. "All you have to do is to take
care they don't hoist the elephant upside
down before they get quite used to it."

Jukes flung the new lead-line over on
the fore-deck with a loud "Here you
are, bo'sn. Don't forget to wet it

E TMAT THE/ DON'T HOlST

f-*

\

«

Typhoon 1 7

thoroughly/' and turned with immense
resolution towards his commander, but
Captain Mac Whirr spread his elbows on
the bridge-rail comfortably.

"Because it would be, I suppose, un-
derstood as a signal of distress/' he went
on. "What do you think? That elephant
there, I take it, stands for something in
the nature of the Union- Jack in the flag.*'

"Does it?" yelled Jukes so that every
head on the Nan-ShatCs decks looked to-
wards the bridge. Then he sighed, and
with sudden resignation, "It would cer-
tainly be a damn distressful sight," he
said meekly. %

Later in the day he accosted the chief
engineer with a confidential "Here ! Let
me tell you the old man's latest."

Mr. Solomon Rout (frequently alluded
to as Long Sol, Old Sol, or Father Rout),
from finding himself almost invariably the
tallest man on board every ship he joined,
had acquired the habit of a stooping, leis-
urely condescension. His hair was scant

1 8 Typhoon

and sandy, his flat cheeks were pale, his
bony wrists and long scholarly hands were
pale, too, as though he had lived all his
life in the shade.

He smiled from on high at Jukes and
went on smoking and glancing about
quietly, in the manner of a kind uncle
lending an ear to the tale of an excited
schoolboy. Then, greatly amused but im-
passive, he asked :

"And did you throw up the billet? "
"No," cried Jukes, in a weary, dis-
couraged voice, above the harsh buzz of
the Nan-Shan's friction winches. All of
them were hard at work, snatching slings
of cargo, high up, to the end of long der-
ricks, only, as it seemed, to let them rip
down recklessly by the run. The cargo
chains groaned in the gins, clinked on
coamings, rattled over the side ; and the
whole ship quivered, with her long grey
flanks smoking in wreaths of steam.
"No," cried Jukes; "I did n't. What 's
the good? I might just as well flinq my

r

Typhoon 19

resignation at this bulkhead. I don't be-
lieve you can make a man like that under-
stand anything. He simply knocks me
over."

At that moment, Captain MacWhirr,
back from the shore, crossed the deck,
umbrella in hand, escorted by a mourn-
ful, self-possessed Chinaman, walking be-
hind in paper-soled silk shoes, who also
carried an umbrella.

The master of the Nan-Shan^ speaking
just audibly and gazing at his boots as his
manner was, remarked that it would be
necessary to call at Fu-chau this trip, and
desired Mr. Rout to have steam up to-
morrow afternoon at one o'clock, sharp.
He pushed back his hat to wipe his fore-
head, observing at the same time that he
hated going ashore, anyhow ; while over-
topping him, Mr. Rout, without deigning
a word, smoked austerely, nursing his
right elbow in the palm of his left hand.
Then Jukes was directed in the same sub-
dued voice to keep the forward 'tween-

20 Typhoon

deck clear of cargo. Two hundred coolies
were going to be put down there. The
Bun Hin Company were sending that lot
home. Twenty-five bags of rice would be
coming off in a sampan directly for stores.
All seven-years* men they were, said Cap-
tain Mac Whirr, with a chest to every man.
The carpenter should be set to work nail-
ing three-inch battens along the deck be-
low, fore and aft, to keep these boxes
from shifting in a seaway. Jukes had
better look to it at once. **D' ye hear,
Jukes?*' This Chinaman here was com-
ing with the ship as far as Fu-chau — a
sort of interpreter he would be. Bun
Hin's clerk he was, and wanted to have a
look at the space. Jukes had better take
him forward. "D* ye hear, Jukes?"

Jukes took good care to punctuate
these instructions ia proper places with
the obligatory "Yes, sir,'* ejaculated with-
out enthusiasm. His brusque "Come
^long, John. Make look see/' set the
* Chinaman in motion at his heels.

Typhoon 21

*'Wanchee look see, all same look see
can do/' said Jukes, who, having no tal-
ent for foreign languages, mangled the
very pigeon English cruelly. He pointed
at the open hatch. ''Catchee number
one piecie place to sleep in. Eh? "

He was gruff, as became his racial su-
periority, but not unfriendly. The China-
man, gazing sad and speechless into the
darkness of the hatchway, seemed to stand
at the head of a yawning grave.

"No catchee rain down there — savee? "
pointed out Jukes. ''Suppose allee same
fine weather, one piecie coolie-man come
topside," he pursued, warming up imagin-
atively. "Make so — phooooo!" He
expanded his chest and blew out his
cheeks. "Savee, John? Breathe — fresh
air. Good. Eh? Washee him piecie
pants, chow-chow topside see, John?"

With his mouth and hands he made
exuberant motions of eating rice and
washing clothes, and the Chinaman, who
concealed his distrust of this pantomime

22 Typhoon

under a collected demeanour, tinged by a
gentle and refined melancholy, glanced
out of his almond eyes from Jukes to the
hatch and back again. " Velly good/' he
murmured, in a disconsolate undertone,
and, hastening smoothly along the decks,
dodging obstacles in his course, he disap-
peared, ducking low under a sling of ten
dirty gunny-bags full of some costly mer-
chandise and exhaling a repulsive smelL

Ill

CAPTAIN MacWHIRR meantime
had gone on the bridge and into
the chart-room, where a letter, com-
menced two days before, awaited termina-
tion. These long letters began with the
words, "My darling wife," and the stew-
ard, between the scrubbing of the floors
and the dusting of chronometer-boxes,
snatched at every opportunity to read
them. They interested him much more
than they possibly could the woman for
whose eye they were intended; and for
this reason, that they related in minute
detail each successive trip of the Nan*
Skan,

Her master, faithful to facts, which
alone his consciousness reflected, would
set them down with painstaking care upon
many pages. The house, in a Northern

23

24 Typhoon

suburb, to which these pages were ad-
dressed, had a bit of garden before the
bow-windowsy a deep porch of good ap-
pearance, coloured glass with imitation
lead frame in the front door. He paid
five-and-forty pounds a year for it, and
did not think the rent too high, because
Mrs. Mac Whirr, a pretentious person with
a scraggy neck and a disdainful manner,
was admittedly ladylike, and in the neigh-
bourhood considered ^s ''quite superior.'*
The only secret of her life was her abject
terror of the time when her husband
would come home to stay for good.
Under the same roof there dwelt also a
daughter called Lydia, and a son, Tom.
These two were but slightly acquainted
with their father. Mainly, they knew
him as a rare but privileged visitor, who
of an evening smoked his pipe in the din-
ing-room and slept in the house. The
lanky girl, upon the whole, was rather
ashamed of him; the boy was frankly
and utterly indifferent, in a straightfor*

n

Typhoon 25

ward, delightful, unaffected way manly
boys have.

And Captain MacWhirr wrote home
from the coast of China twelve times
every year, desiring queerly to be ''re-
membered to the children,'' and subscrib-
ing himself "Your loving husband" as
calmly as if the words so long used by sa
many men were, apart from their shape,
worn out things of a faded meaning.

The China seas. North and South,
are narrow seas. They are seas full of
every-day, eloquent facts, such as islands,
sand-banks, reefs, swift and changeable
currents — tangled facts that nevertheless
speak to a seaman in clear and definite
language. Their speech appealed to
Captain MacWhirr's sense of realities so
forcibly that he had given up his state-
room below and practically lived all his
days on the bridge of his ship, often hav-
ing his meals sent up, and sleeping at
night in the chart-room. And he indited
there his home letters. Each of them

26 Typhoon

without exception, contained the phrase,
•'The weather has been very fine this
trip/' or some other form of a statement
to that effect. And this statement, too,
in its wonderful persistence, was of the
same perfect accuracy as all the others
they contained.

Mr. Rout likewise wrote letters, only
no one on board knew how chatty he
could be, pen in hand, because the chief-
engineer had enough imagination to keep
his desk locked.- His wife relished his
style greatly. They were a childless
couple, and Mrs. Rout — a big, high-
bosomed, jolly woman of forty, — shared
with Mr. Rout's toothless and venerable
mother a little cottage near Teddington.
She would run over her correspondence at
breakfast with lively eyes, and scream out
interesting passages in a joyous voice at
the deaf old lady, prefacing each extract
by the warning shout, "Solomon says!"
She had the trick of firing off Solomon's
utterances also upon strangers, astonish-

Typhoon 27

ing them easily by the unfamiliar text and
the unexpectedly jocular vein of these
quotations. On the day the new curate
called for the first time at the cottage, she
found occasion to remark, "As Solomon
says, the engineers that go down to the
sea in ships behold the wonders of sailor
nature"; when a change in the visitor's
countenance made her stop and stare.

"Solomon! Oh!— Mrs. Rout!" stut-
tered the young man, startled, shocked,
and red in the face. "I must say — I
don't •'

"He 's my husband," she announced in
a great shout, throwing herself back in
the chair. Perceiving the joke, she
laughed immoderately with a handker-
chief to her eyos, while he sat wearing a
forced smile and, from his inexperience
of jolly women, was persuaded that she
must be deplorably insane. They were
excellent friends afterwards; for, absolv-
ing her from irreverent intention, he came
to think she was a very worthy person

28 Typhoon

indeed ; and he learned in time to receive
without flinching other scraps of Solo-
mon's wisdom.

"For my part," Solomon was reported
by his wife to have said once» "give me
the dullest ass for a skipper before a rogue.
There is a way to take a fool, but a rogue
is smart and slippery." This was an airy
generalisation drawn from the particular
case of Captain MacWhirr's honesty,
which, in itself, had the heavy obvious-
ness of a lump of clay. On the other
hand, Mr. Jukes, unable to generalise,
unmarried, and unengaged, was in the
habit of opening his heart after another
fashion to an old chum and former ship*
mate, actually serving as second officer on
board an Atlantic liner.

First of all, he would insist upon the
advantages of the Eastern trade, hinting
at its superiority to the Western ocean
service. He extolled the sky, the seas^
the ships, and the easy life of the Far
East. The Nan-Shan^ he affirmed, waff

Typhoon 29

second to none as a sea-boat. "We have
no brass-bound uniforms, but then we are
like brothers here," he wrote. " We all
mess together and live like fighting cocks.
. . . All the chaps of the black-squad
are as decent as they make that kind, and
old Sol, the chief, is a dry stick. We are
good friends. As to our old man, you
could not find a quieter skipper. Some^
times you would think he had n't sense
enough to see anything wrong. And yet
it is n't that. Can't be. He has been in
command for a good few years now. He
does n't do anything actually foolish, and
gets his ship along all right without wor-
rying anybody. I believe he has n't
brains enough to enjoy kicking up a row.
I don't take advantage of him. I would
scorn it. Outside the routine of duty he
does n't seem to understand more than
half of what you tell him. We get a
laugh out of this at times, but it is dull,
too, to be with a man like this — in the
long run. Old Sol says he has n't much

30 Typhoon

conversation. Conversation! Oh, Lordl
He never talks. The other day I had
been yarning under the bridge with one of
the engineers, and he must have heard us.
When I came up to take my watch he
steps out of the chart-room and has a
good look all round, peeps over at the
sidelights, glances at the compass, squints
upwards at the stars. That 's his regular
performance. By-and-bye he says : 'Was
that you talking just now in the port
alley- way? * — *Yes, sir.' — 'With the third
engineer?' — 'Yes, sir.* He walks off to
starboard and sits under the dodger on a
little campstool of his and for half an
hour, perhaps, he makes no sound except
that I heard him sneeze once. Then
after a while I hear him getting up over
there and he strolls across to port where
I was. 'I can't understand what you can
find to talk about,' says he. 'Two solid
hours. I am not blaming you. I see
people ashore at it all day long, and then
in the evening they sit down and keep at

Typhoon 3'

it over the drinks. Must be saying the
same things over and over again. I can't
understand. ' Did you ever hear anything
like that? And he was so patient about
it ! It made me quite sorry for him. But
he is exasperating, too, sometimes. Of
course, one would not do anything to vex
him even if it were worth while. But it
is n't. He 's so jolly dense that if you
were to put your thumb to your nose and
wave your fingers at him, he would only
wonder gravely to himself what got into
you. He told me once quite simply that
he found it very difficult to make out
what made people always act so queerly.
He 's too dense to trouble about and
that's the truth."

Thus wrote Mr. Jukes to his chum in
the Western ocean trade, out of the ful-
ness of his heart and the liveliness of his
fancy.

He had expressed his honest opinion.
It was not worth while trying to im-
press a man like that. If the world had

3^ Typhoon

been full of such men life would have
probably appeared to Jukes an unenter*
taining and unprofitable business. He
was not alone in his opinion. The sea
itself, as if sharing Mr. Jukes's good-nat-
ured forbearance, had never put itself out
to startle the silent man who seldom
looked up and wandered innocently over
the waters with the only visible purpose
of getting food, raiment, and house-room
for three people ashore. Dirty weather
he had known, of course. He had been
made wet, uncomfortable, tired in the
usual way, — felt at the time and presently
forgotten. So that upon the whole he
had been justified in reporting fine
weather at home. But he had never been
given a glimpse of immeasurable strength
and of immoderate wrath, the wrath that
passes exhausted but never appeased — the
wrath and fury of the passionate sea. He
knew it existed, as we know that crime
and '^i^ominations exist ; he had heard of
it as a peaceable citizen in a town hears

Typhoon 33

of battles, famines, and floods, and yet
knows nothing of what these things mean,
though, indeed, he may have been mixed
up in a street row, have gone without his
dinner once, or been soaked to the skin in
a sl^ower. He sailed over the surface of
the oceans as some men go skimming
over the years of existence and sink at last
into a placid grave, ignorant of life to the
last, without ever having been made to
see all it contains of perfidy, violence,
and terror. There are on sea and land
such men, thus fortunate, or thus dis-
dained by destiny or by the sea.

IV

OBSERVING the steady fall of the
barometer, Captain MacWhirr
thought, "There's some dirty weather
knocking about." This is precisely what
he thought. He had had an experience
of moderately dirty weather, the term
dirty, as applied to the weather in itself,
implying only moderate discomfort to the
seaman. Had he been informed by an
indisputable authority that the end of the
world was to be finally accomplished by
a catastrophic disturbance of the atmo-
sphere, he would have assimilated the in<
formation under the simple idea of dirty
weather, and no other, because he had no
experience of cataclysms and belief does
not necessarily imply comprehension.
The wisdom of his country had pro-
nounced by means of an Act of Parlia-

2A

Typhoon 35

ment that before he could be Considered
as fit to take charge of a ship he should
be able to answer certain simple questions
i>n the subject of circular storms, such as
hurricanes, cyclones, typhoons, — and ap-
parently he had answered them, since he
was now in command of the Nan^Shan
in the China seas during the season of
typhoons. But if he had answered, he
remembered nothing of it. He was, how-
ever, conscious of being made uncomfort-
able by the clammy heat. He came out
on the bridge and found no relief to this
oppression. The air seemed thick. He
gasped like a fish and began to believe
himself greatly out of sorts.

The Nan-Shan was ploughing a vanish-
ing furrow upon the circle of the sea that
had a surface like a piece of grey satin ;
and under this surface slow undulations
passed, unbroken and smooth, swinging
the ship bodily up and down at regular
intervals. The white patch of mist de*
clined down the sky together with the

3^ Typhoon

sun whichy pale and without rays, poured
a leaden heat in a strangely indecisive
light, and the Chinamen were lying pros-
trate about the decks. Their bloodless,
pinched yellow faces were like the faces
of bilious invalids. Captain MacWhirr
noticed two of them especially, stretched
out on their backs below the bridge. As
soon as they had closed their eyes they
seemed dead. Three others, however,
were quarrelling barbarously away for-
ward, and one big fellow, half naked,
with herculean shoulders, was hanging
limply over a winch ; while another, sitting
on the deck, his knees up and his head
drooping sideways in a girlish attitude,
was plaiting his tail with infinite languor
depicted in his whole person and in the
very movement of his fingers. The
smoke struggled with difficulty out of
the funnel, and instead of streaming away
spread out like an infernal sort of cloud>
smelling of sulphur and raining soot on
the decks.

i

V

Typhoon 37

*'What the devil are you doing there,
Mr. Jukes?" asked Captain Mac Whirr.

This unusual form of address, though
mumbled rather than spoken, caused the
body of Mr. Jukes to start as though it
had been prodded under the fifth rib. He
had had a low bench brought on the
bridge, and, sitting on it with a length of
rope curled about his feet and a piece of
canvas stretched over his knees, was push-
ing a sail-needle vigorously. He looked
up, and his surprise gave to his eyes an
expression of innocence and candour.

"I am only roping some of that new set

of bags we made last trip for whipping up

coals," he remonstrated gently. **We

shall want them for the next coaling, sir."

'* What became of the others?"

"Why! Worn out, of course, sir."

Captain Mac Whirr, after glaring down

irresolutely at his chief mate, disclosed

the gloomy and cynical conviction that

more than half of them had been lost

overboard," if only the truth was known,"

38 Typhoon

and retired to the other end of the bridge.
Jukes, exasperated by this unprovoked
attack, broke the needle at the second
stitch; and, dropping his work, got up
and cursed the heat in a violent under-
tone.

The propeller thumped, the three China-
men forward had given up squabbling
very suddenly, and the one who had
been plaiting his tail clasped his legs and
stared dejectedly over his knees. The
lurid sunshine cast faint and sickly shad-
ows. The swell ran higher and swifter
every moment, and the ship lurched
heavily in the smooth, deep hollows of
the sea.

**I wonder where that beastly swell
comes from," said Jukes aloud, recover-
ing himself after a stagger.

"Northeast," grunted the literal Mac-
Whirr, from his side of the bridge.
"There's some dirty weather knocking
about. Go and look at the glass."

When Jukes came out of the chart-room

Typhoon 39

the cast of his countenance had changed to
thought fulness and concern. He caught
hold of the bridge-rail and stared ahead.
The temperature in the engine-room
had gone up to no degrees. Irritated
voices were ascending through the sky<^
light and through the fiddle of the stoke-
hole. They made a harsh and resonant
uproar, mingled with angry clangs and
scrapes of metal, as if men with limbs of
iron and throats of bronze had been quar-
relling down there. The second engineer
was falling foul of the stokers for letting
the steam go down. He was a man with
arms like a blacksmith and generally
feared, but that afternoon the stokers
were answering him back recklessly and
slammed the furnace doors with the fury
of despair. Then the noise ceased sud-
denly and the second engineer appeared,
emerging out of the stoke-hole, streaked
with grime and soaking wet, like a chim-
ney-sweep coming out of a well. As
soon as his head was clear of the fiddle he

40 Typhoon

began upbraiding Jukes for not trimming
properly the stoke-hole ventilators, and in
answer Jukes made with his hands depre-
catory, soothing signs, meaning : no wind
— can't be helped — you can see for your-
self. But the other would n't hear reason.
His teeth flashed angrily in his dirty face,
and he cursed like a madman. He did n't
mind, he said, the trouble of punching
their blanked heads down there, blank his
soul, but did the condemned sailors think
you could keep steam up in the God-for-
saken boilers simply by knocking the
blanked stokers about? No, by George!
You had to get some draught, too — may
he be everlastingly blanked for a swab-
headed deck-hand, if you didn't! And
the chief, too, rampaging before the
steam-gauge and carrying on like a lunatic
all over the engine-room ever since noon.
What did Jukes think he was stuck up
there for, if he could n't get one of his
decayed, good-for-nothing, deck-cripples
to turn the ventilators to the windf

Typhoon 41

The relations of the "engine-room "
and the "deck " of the Nan-Shan were, as
is known, of a brotherly nature ; therefore
Jukes leaned over and begged the other in
a restrained tone not to make a disgusting
ass of himself — the skipper was on the
other side of the bridge. But the seconH
declared mutinously that he did n't care
who was on the other side of the bridge,
and Jukes, passing in a flash from lofty
disapproval into a state of exaltation, in-
vited him in unflattering terms to come
up and twist the beastly things to please
himself, and to catch such wind as a don-
key of his sort could find. The second
rushed up to the fray. He flung himself
at the port ventilator as though he meant
to tear it out bodily and toss it overboard.
All he did was to move round the cowl a
few inches, with an enormous expenditure
of force, and seemed spent in the
effort. He leaned against the back of
the wheel-house, and Jukes walked up to
him.

42 Typhoon

"Oh, heavens!" ejaculated the engi-
neer in a feeble voice. He lifted his eyes
to the sky and then let his glassy stare de-
scend to meet the horizon that, tilting up
to an angle of forty degrees, seemed to
hang on a slant for awhile and settle
down slowly. "Heavens! Phew! What's
up, anyhow?"

Jukes, straddling his long legs like a
pair of compasses, put on an air of su-
periority. "We're going to catch it this
time," he said. "The barometer is
tumbling down like anything, Harry.
And you trying to kick up that silly row. ' '

It seemed as though the word "barom-
eter" had revived the second engineer's
mad animosity. Collecting afresh all his
energies he directed Jukes in a low and
brutal tone to shove the unmentionable
instrument down his gory throat. Who
cared for his crimson barometer? It was
the steam — the steam — that was going
down; and what between the firemen
going faint and the chief going silly, it

«

Typhoon 43

was worse than axlog's life for him; and
\ie did n't care a tinker's curse how soon
the whole show was blown out of the
water. He seemed on the point of hav-
ing a cry, but, after regaining his breath,
he muttered darkly, "I '11 faint them,'*
and dashed off. He stopped upon tha
fiddle long enough to shake his fist at
the unnatural daylight and dropped into
the dark hole with a whoop.

WHEN Jukes turned round, his eyes
fell upon the rounded back and
the big red ears of Captain MacWhirr,
who had come across. He did not look
at his chief ofHcer, but said at once :

"That 's a very violent man, that sec-
ond engineer."

"Jolly good second, anyhow," grunted
Jukes. "They can't keep up steam," he
added rapidly, and made a grab at the rail
against the coming lurch.

Captain Mac Whirr, unprepared, took a
run and brought himself up with a jerk by
an awning stanchion.

"A profane man," he said obstinately.
"If this goes on I'll have to get rid of
him the iirst chance."

"It's the heat," said Jukes. "The
weather 's awful. It would make a saint

44

T)rphoon 45

swear. Even up here I feel exactly as if
I had my head tied up in a woollen
blanket.*'

Captain Mac Whirr looked up.

*'D!ye mean to say, Mr. Jukes, you
ever had your head tied up in a blanket?
What was that for? "

"It's a manner of speaking, sir/' said
Jukes, stolidly.

"Some of you fellows do go on!
What 's that about saints swearing? I
wish you would n't talk so wild. What
sort of saint would that be that would
swear? No more saint than yourself, I
expect. And what 's a blanket got to do
with it — or the weather either? The heat
does not make me swear — does it? It *s
filthy bad temper. That's what it is.
And what 's the good of you talking like
this? ..."

Thus Captain MacWhirr expostulated
against the use of images in speech, and
at the end electrified Jukes by a contemp-
tuous snort followed by words of passion

^

46 Typhoon

and resentment. ' ' Damme ! I 'U fire him
out of the ship if he don't look out."

And Jukes, incorrigible, thought:

"Goodness me! Somebody's put a
new inside to my old man. Here 's tem-
per, if you like. Of course it 's the
weather; what else? It would make an
angel quarrelsome — let alone a saint."

All the Chinamen on deck appeared at
their last gasp.

At its setting the sun had a diminished
diameter and an expiring brown, rayless
glow, as if millions of centuries elapsing
since the morning had brought it near its
end. A dense bank of cloud became visi-
ble to the northward: it had a sinister
dark olive tint, and lay low and motion-
less upon the sea, resembling a solid ob-
stacle in the path of the ship. She went
floundering towards it like an exhausted
creature driven to its death. The coppery
twilight retired slowly, and the darkness
brought out overhead a swarm of un-
steady big stars that, as if blown upon,

Typhoon 47

flickered exceedingly and seemed to hang
very near the earth. At eight o'clock
Jukes went into the chart-room to write
up the ship's log.

He copied neatly out of the rough-book
the number of miles, the course of the
ship, and in the column for "Wind" he
scrawled the word **Calm" from top to
bottom of the eight hours since noon. He
was exasperated by the continuous, mo-
notonous rolling of the ship. - The heavy
inkstand would slide away in a manner
that suggested perverse intelligence in
dodging the pen. / Having written in the
large space under the head of ** Remarks,"
"Heat very oppressive," he stuck the end
of the penholder in his teeth, pipe-fashion,
and mopped his face carefully.

"Ship rolling heavily in a high cross-
swell," he began again, and commented
to himself, " 'Heavily* is no word for it."
Then he wrote : * * Sunset threatening, with
a low bank of clouds to N. and E. Sky
clear overhead."

48 Typhoon

Sprawling over the table with arrested
pen he glanced out of the door, and in
that frame of his vision he saw all the
stars flying upwards between the teak-
wood jambs on a black sky. The whole
lot took flight together and disappeared,
leaving only a blackness flecked with
white flashes, for the sea was as black as
the sky and speckled with foam afar. The
stars had flown to the roll and came back
on the return swing of the ship, rushing
downwards in a swarming glitter not of
fiery points but enlarged to tiny discs, bril-
liant with a clear, wet sheen.

He watched the flying big stars for a
moment, and then wrote: "8 p.m. Swell
increasing. Ship labouring and taking
water on her decks. Battened down the
coolies for the night. Barometer still
falling. " He paused and thought to him-
self, "Perhaps nothing whatever *11 come
of it." And then he closed resolutely his
entries: ** Every appearance of a typhoon
coming on."

^

Typhoon 49

On going out he had to stand aside,
and Captain* MacWhirr strode over the
doorstep without saying a word or mak-
ing a sign.

''Shut the door, Mr. Jukes, will you?'.*
he cried from within.

Jukes turned back to do so, muttering
ironically, "Afraid to catch cold, I sup-
pose." It was his watch below, but he
yearned for communion with his kind ; and
he remarked cheerily to the second mate :
"Does n't look so bad, after all, does it? "

The second mate was marching to and
fro on the bridge, tripping down with
small steps one moment, and the next
climbing with difficulty the shifting slope
of the deck. At the sound of Jukes's
voice he stood still, facing forward, but
made no answer.

"Hallo! That's a heavy one," said
Jukes, swaying to meet the long roll till
his lowered hand touched the planks.
This time the second mate made in hid
throat a noise of an unfriendly nature.

4

50 Typhoon

He was an oldish, shabby little fellow,
with bad teeth and no hair on his face.
He had been shipped in a hurry in
Shanghai that ,trip when the second offi-
cer brought from home had delayed the
ship three hours in port by contriving (in
some manner Captain MacWhirr could
never understand) to fall overboard into
an empty coal-lighter alongside ; and had
to be sent ashore to the hospital with con-
cussion of the brain and a broken limb or

tl¥0.

VI

JUKES was not discouraged by the
unsympathetic sound. "The China-
men must be having a lovely time of it
down there," he said. "It's lucky for
them the old girl has the easiest roll of
any ship I *ve ever been in. There, now.
This one was n't so bad."

* * You wait, * ' snarled the second mate.
With his sharp nose, red at the tip, and
his thin, pinched lips, he always looked as
though he were raging inwardly, and he
was concise in his speech to the point of
rudeness. All his time off duty he spent
in his cabin with the door shut, and keep-
ing so still in there that he was supposed
to fall asleep as soon as he had disap-
.peared; but the man who came in to
wake him for his watch on deck would in-
variably find him with his eyes wide

SI

$2 Typhoon

open, flat on his back in the bunk, and
glaring irritably from a soiled pillow. He
never wrote any letters, did not seem to
hope for news from any where, and though
he had been heard once to mention West
Hartlepool, it was with extreme bitter-
ness and only in connection with the
charges in a boarding-house. He was one
of those men who are picked up by ships
in the ports of the world. They are com-
petent enough, appear hopelessly hard
up, show no evidence of any sort of vice,
and carry about them all the signs of
manifest failure. They come aboard on
an emergency, care for no ship afloat,
live in their own atmosphere of casual
connection amongst their shipmates, who
know nothing of them, and make up their
minds to leave at inconvenient times.
They clear out, with no words of leave-
taking, in some God- forsaken port that
other men would fear to be stranded in,
and go ashore in company with a shabby
sea-chest corded like a treasure-box, and

Typhoon 53

with an air of shaking the ship's dust off
their feet.

"You wait/' he repeated, balancing in
great swings with his back to Jukes, mo-
tionless and implacable.

"Do you mean to say we are going to
catch it hot? *' asked Jukes, with boyish
interest.

' ' Say ? I say nothing. You don ' t catch
me! " snapped the little second mate with
a mixture of pride, scorn, and cunning, as
if Jukes*s question had been a trap clev-
erly detected. "Oh, no! None of you
here shall make a fool of me if I know
it," he mumbled to himself.

Jukes reflected rapidly that this second
mate was a mean little beast, and in his
heart he wished poor Jack Allen had
never smashed himself up in the coal-
lighter. The far-off blackness ahead of
the ship was like another night seen
through the starry night of the earth — a
blackness without stars — the night of the |

immensities beyond the created universe

54 Typhoon

revealed in its appalling stillness through
a low fissure in the glittering sphere of
which the earth is the kernel.

"Whatever there might be about,"
said Jukes, "we are steaming straight into
it."

" You 've said it," caught up the second
mate, always with his back to Juke^.
"You 've said it-mind. Not I."

"Oh, go to Jericho!" said Jukes,
frankly ; and the other emitted a trium-
phant little chuckle. "You 've said it,"
he repeated.

"And what of that?"

"I 've known some real good men get
into trouble with their skippers for saying
a dam' sight less," answered the second
mate feverishly. "Oh, no! You don't
catch me."

"You seem deucedly anxious not
to give yourself away," said Jukes,
completely soured by such absurdity.
"I would n't be afraid to say what I
think."

Typhoon 55

"Aye, to me! That 's no great trick.
I am nobody, and well I know it."

The ship, after a pause of comparative
steadiness, started upon a series of rolls,
one worse than the other, and for a time
Jukes, preserving his equilibrium, was too
busy to open his mouth. As soon as the
violent swinging had quieted down some-
what, he said :

''This is a bit too much of a good
thing. Whether anything is coming or
not, I think she ought to be put head-on
to that swell. The old man is just gone
in to lie down. Hang me if I don't speak
to him ! "

But when he opened the door of the
chart-room he saw his Captain reading a
book. Captain Mac Whirr was not lying
down : he was standing up, with one hand
grasping the edge of the bookshelf and
the other holding open before his face a
thick volume. The lamp wriggled in the
gimbals, the loosened books toppled
from side to side on the shelf, the long

56 Typhoon

barometer swung in jerky circles, the

table altered its slant every moment. In

the midst of all this stir and movement

Captain MacWhirr, very steady on his

ieet and holding on, was reading in a J

book.

1

VIl

WHEN Jukes opened the door the
Captain showed his eyes above
the upper edge, and asked :

•'What's the matter?"

"Swell getting worse, sir."

"Noticed that in here," muttered Cap-
tain Mac Whirr. * * Anything wrohg ? ' '

Jukes, inwardly disconcerted by the
seriousness of the eyes looking at him
over the top of the book, produced an
embarrassed grin.

"Rolling like old boots," he said
sheepishly,

"Aye! Very heavy. Very heavy.
What do you want? "

At this Jukes lost his footing and be*
gan to flounder.

"I was thinking of our passengers," he
said, in the manner of a man clutching
at a straw.

17

58 Typhoon

"Passengers?" wondered the Captain,
gravely. ' * What passengers ? ' '

* * Why ! The Chinamen, sir, ' * explained
Jukes, very sick of this conversation.

"The Chinamen! Why don't you
speak plainly? Couldn't tell what you
meant. Never heard a lot of coolies
spoken of as passengers before. Passen-
gers, indeed ! What 's come to you? "

Captain Mac Whirr, closing the book on
his forefinger, lowered his arm and looked
completely mystified. "Why are you
thinking of the Chinamen, Mr. Jukes?"
he inquired.

Jukes took a plunge like a man driven
to it.

* ' She 's rolling her decks full of water,
sir. Thought you might put her head-on
perhaps — for a while. Till this goes down
a bit-^very soon. Head to the eastward.
I never knew a ship roll like this."

He held on in the doorway, and Cap-
tain MacWhirr, feeling his grip on the
shelf inadequate, made up his mind to

Typhoon 59

let go in a hurry and fell heavily on the
couch.

**Head to the eastward," he said,
struggling to sit up, "That 's more than
four points off her course,"

**Yes, sir. Fifty degrees .
would just bring her head far enough
round to meet this. . . ."

Captain MacWhirr was now sitting up.
He had not dropped the book and he had
not lost his place.

**To the eastward," he repeated, with
dawning astonishment. "To the , . .
Where do you think we are bound to?
You want me to haul a full-powered
steamship four points off her course to
make the Chinamen comfortable! Now
I 've heard more than enough of mad
things done in the world — but this. • . .
If I did n't know you, Jukes, I would
think you were in liquor. Steer four
points off . . . and what afterwards?
Steer four points over the other way, I
suppose, to make the course good. What

6o Typhoon

put it into your head that I would start
to tack a steamer as if she were a sailing
ship?"

"Jolly good thing she isn't/* threw in
Jukes, with bitter readiness. ' ' She would
have rolled every blessed stick out 6f her
this afternoon.'*

"Aye! And you just would have had
to stand and see them go/' said Captain
MacWhirr, showing a certain animation.
"It 's a dead calm, is n't it? "

"It is, sir. But there 's something out
of the common coming for sure. ' '

"Maybe. I suppose you have a notion
I should be getting out of the way of that
dirt," said Captain Mac Whirr, speaking
with the utmost simplicity of manner and
tone, and fixing the oilcloth on the floor
with a heavy stare. Thus he noticed
neither Jukes's discomfiture nor the mix-
ture of vexation and astonished respect
on his face.

"Now here 's this book," he continued
with deliberation, slapping his thigh with

Typhoon 6i

the closed volume. ' I've been reading
the chapter on the winds there."

This was true. He had been reading
the chapter on the winds. When he had
entered the chart-room it was with no in-
tention of taking the book down. Some
influence in the air — the same influence,
probably, that caused the steward to bring
without orders the Captain's sea-boots
and oilskin coat up to the chart-room —
had, as it were, guided his hand to the
shelf. And without condescending to sit
down he had waded with a conscious effort
into the terminology of the subject. He
lost himself amongst advancing semicir-
cles, left- and right-hand quadrants, the
curves of the tracks, the probable bearing
of the centre, the shifts of winds, and the
readings of barometer. He tried to bring
all these things into a definite relation to
himself, and ended by becoming con-
temptuously angry with such a lot of
words and with so much advice that
seemed to him all sheer headwork and

62 Typhoon

supposition without a glimmer of certi-
tude.

"It's the confoundest thing, Jukes/'
he said. "If a fellow was to believe all
that 's in there he would be running most
of his time all over the sea trying to get
behind the weather."

Again he slapped his leg with the book,
and Jukes opened his mouth, but said
nothing.

"Running to get behind the weather!
Do you understand that, Mr. Jukes? It 's
the maddest thing," ejaculated Captain
MacWhirr, with pauses, gazing at the
floor profoundly. "You would think an
old woman had been writing this. It
passes me. If that thing means anything
useful, then it means that I should at
once alter the course away — away to
the devil somewhere, and come booming
down on Fu-chau from the northward at
the tail of this dirty weather that 's sup-
posed to be knocking about in our way.
From the north! Do you understand,

Typhoon 63

Mr. Jukes? Three hundred extra miles
to the distance, and a pretty coal bill
to show. I could n't bring myself to
do that if every word in there was gos-
pel truth, Mr. Jukes. Don't you expect
me. ...

And Jukes, silent, marvelled at this
display of feeling and loquacity.

"But the truth is that you don't know
if the fellow is right, anyhow. How can
you tell what a gale is made of till you
get it ? He is n't aboard here, is he ?
Very well. Here he says that the centre
of them things bears eight points off the
wind. But we have n't got any wind,
for all the barometer falling. Where 's
his centre now?"

"We shall get the wind presently,"
mumbled Jukes.

"Let it come, then," said Captain Mac-
Whirr, with dignified indignation. "It 's
only to let you see, Mr. Jukes, that you
don't find everything in books. All these
rules for dpdging breezes and circumvent-

64 Typhoon

ing the winds of heaven, Mr. Jukes, seeoi
to me the maddest thing, when you come
to look at it sensibly. ' '

He looked up, saw Jukes gazing at
him dubiously, and tried to illustrate his
meaning.

"About as queer as your extraordinary
notion of dodging the ship head to sea,
for I don*t know how long, to make the
Chinamen cojnfortable ; while all we've
got to do is to take them to Fu-chau, be-
ing expected to get there before noon on
Friday. If the weather delays me — ^very
well. There's your log-t>ook to talk
straight about the weather. But suppose
I went swinging off three hundred miles
out of my course and came in two days
late, and they asked me : 'Where have you
been all that time, Captain? ' What could
I say to that? 'Went around to dodge
the bad weather,' I would say. 'It
must 've been dam' bad,' they would say.
'Don't know,' I would have to say; *I Ve
dodged clear of it.' See that. Jukes? I

Typhoon 65

have' been thinking it all out this after-

noon."

He looked up again in his unseeing,
unimaginative way. No one had ever
heard him say so much at one time.
Jukes, with his arms open, in the door-
way, was like a man invited to confront a
miracle; Unbounded wonder was the in-
tellectual meaning of his eye, while hard
incredulity was seated in his whole coun-
tenance.

"A gale is a gale, Mr. Jukes," resumed
the Captain, "and a full-powered steam-
ship has got to face it. There 's just so
much dirty weather knocking about the
world, and the proper thing is to go
through it with none of what old Captain
Wilson of the Melita calls storm -strategy.
The other day ashore I heard him hold
forth about it to a lot of shipmasters who
came in and sat at a table next to mine.
It seemed to me the greatest nonsense.
He was telling them how he — outman-
oeuvred, I think he said — a terrific gale.

66 Typhoon

so that it never came nearer than fifty
miles to him. A neat piece of headwork,
he called it. How he knew there was a
gale fifty miles off beats me altogether. It
was like listening to a crazy man. I
would have thought Captain Wilson was
old enough to know better."

Captain MacWhirr ceased for a mo-
ment, then said: "It's your watch below,
Mr. Jukes? " Jukes came to himself with
a start.

"Yes, sir."

"Leave orders to call me at the slight-
est change,'' said the Captain. He reached
up to put the book away and tucked his
legs upon the couch. "Shut the door so
that it don't fly open — will you? I can't
stand a door banging. They 've put a lot
of rubbishy locks in this ship — I must
say/'

vin

CAPTAIN MacWHIRR closed his
eyes. He did so to rest himself.
He was tired, and he experienced that

e *

state of mental vacuity which comes upon
pne at the end of an exhaustive discussion
that had liberated some belief matured in
the course of meditative years. He had
indeed been making his confession of
faith, had he only known it. And its
effect was to make Jukes on the other side
of the door stand scratching his head for
a good while.

Captain MacWhirr opened his eyes.

He thought he must have been asleep.
What was that loud noise? Wind? Why
had he not been called? The lamp wrig-
gled in its gimbals, the barometer swung
in circles, the table altered its slant every
moment: a pair of limp sea-boots with

*7

68 Typhoon

collapsed long tops went sliding past the
couch. He put out his hand instantly
and captured one.

Juke's face appeared in a crack of the
door, — only his face, very red, with star-
ing eyes. The flame of the lamp leaped ;
a piece of paper flew up; a rush of air
struck and enveloped Captain MacWhirr.
Beginning to draw on the boot he directed
an expectant gaze at Jukes's swollen, ex-
cited features.

"Came on like this," shouted Jukes.
"Five minutes ago • • • all of a
sudden."

The head disappeared with a bang, and
a heavy splash and patter of drops swept
past the closed door as if a pailful of
melted lead had been flung against the
house. A vhistling could be heard now
upon the deep, vibrating noise outside.

The stuffy chart-room seemed as full of
draughts as a shed. Captain MacWhirr
collared the other sea-boot on its violent
passage along the floor. He was not

\

Typhoon 69

flustered, but he could not find at once
the bpening for inserting his foot. The
shoes he had flung of! were scurrying from
end to end of the cabin, gambolling play-
fully over each other like puppies. As
soon as he stood up he kicked at them
viciously, but without effect.

He threw himself into the attitude of a
lounging fencer to reach after his oilskin
coat ; and afterwards he staggered all over
the confined space while he jerked himself
into it. Very grave, straddling his legs
far apart, and stretching his neck, he
started to tie deliberately the strings of
his sou'wester under his chin, with thick
fingers that trembled slightly. He went
through all the movements of a woman
putting on her bonnet before a glass,
with a mien of strained, listening atten-
tion, as though he expected every mo-
ment to hear the shout of his name,
shouted in the confused clamour that had
suddenly beset his ship. Its increase
filled his ears while he was getting ready

f

/

70 Typhoon

to go out and confront whatever it might
mean. It was tumultuous and very loud,
too, made up of the rush of the wind, the
crashes of the sea, with that prolonged,
deep vibration of the air, like the roll of
an immense and remote drum beating the
charge of the gale.

He stood for a moment in the light of
the lamp — thick, clumsy, shapeless, in
his panoply of combat, vigilant and red-
faced.

** There 's a lot of weight in this," he
muttered.

As soon as he attempted to open the
door the wind caught it and he was ab«
solutely dragged out over the doorstep ;
clinging to the handle, he was flung
around, and at once found himself en-
gaged with the wind in a sort of personal
scuffle whose object was the shutting of
that door. At the last moment a tongue
of air scurried in and licked out the flame
of the lamp.

Ahead of the ship he perceived a great

r,'

Typhoon 7i

darkness lying upon a multitude of white
flashes ; on the starboard beam a few
amazing stars drooped, dim and fitful,
above an immense waste of broken seas,
as if seen through a mad drift of smoke.

On the bridge a knot of men, indistinct
and toiling, were making great efforts in
the light of the wheel-house windows that
shone mistily on their heads and backs.
Suddenly, darkness closed upon one pane,
then on another. The voices of the lost
group reached him after the manner of
men's voices in a gale, in shreds and
fragments of forlorn shouting snatched
past the ear. All at once Jukes ap-
peared at his side, yelling, with his head
down:

** Watch — put in — wheel-house shutters
— glass — afraid — blow in."

Jukes heard his commander upbraiding.

' * This — come — anything — warning —
call me."

He tried to explain with the uproar
pressing on his lips r

72 Typhoon

*' Light air — remained — bridge — sud-
den — northeast— could turn — thought-^
you — sure — hear. "

They had gained the shelter of the
weather-cloth and could converse with
raised voices as people quarrel.

"I got the hands to cover up all the
ventilators. Good job I had remained on
deck. I did n*t think you would be
asleep, and so . . . What did you
say, sir? What?'*

"Nothing,*' cried Captain Mac Whirr.
••I said— all right."

' * By all the powers ! We 've got it this
time," observed Jukes in a howl.

"You have n't altered her course? " in-
quired Captain Mac Whirr, straining his

voice.

4«

No, sir. Certainly not. Wind came
out right ahead. And here comes the
head sea."

A plunge of the ship ended in a shock
as if she had landed her forefoot upon
something solid. After a moment of still

Typhoon 73

ness a lofty flight of sprays drove hard
with the wind upon their faces.

"Keep her at it as long as we can/'
shouted Captain Mac Whirr.

Before Jukes had squeezed the salt
water out of his eyes f*\l the stars had
disappeared.

IX

JUKES was as ready a man as any half*
dozen young mates that may be
caught by casting a net upon the waters,
and though he had been somewhat taken
aback by the startling viciousness of the
first squall he had pulled himself together
on the instant, had called out the hands,
and had rushed then to secure such open-
ings about the deck as had not been
already battened down earlier in the even-
ing. Shouting in his fresh, stentorian
voice, **Jump, boys, and bear a hand!"
he led in the work, telling himself the
while that he had **just expected this."

But at the same time he was growing
aware that this was rather more than he
had expected. From the first stir of the
air on his cheek the gale seemed to take
upon itself the accumulated impetus of an
avalanche. Heavy sprays enveloped the

74

Typhoon 75

Nan-Shan from stem to stern, and in-
stantly, in the midst of her regular rolling,
she began to jerk and plunge as though
she had gone mad with fright.

Jukes thought: "This is no joke."
While he was exchanging explanatory
yells with his Captain a sudden lowering of
the darkness came upon the night, falling
before their vision like something palpable.
It was as if the masked lights of the world
had been turned down. Jukes was un-
critically glad to have his Captain at hand. ^^
It relieved him, as though that man had,
by simply coming on deck, taken at once
most of the gale's weight upon his shoul-
ders. Such is the prestige, the privilege,
and the burden of command.

Captain MacWhirr could expect no
comfort of that sort from any one on
earth. Such is the loneliness of com-
mand. *He was trying to see, with that
watchful manner of a seaman who stares
into the wind's eye as if into the eye of
an adversary, to penetrate the hidden

76 Typhoon

intention and guess the aim and force o{
the thrust. The strong wind swept at him
out of a vast obscurity ; he felt under his
feet the uneasiness of his ship, and he
could not even discern a shadow of her
shape. He wished it were not so; and
very still he waited, feeling stricken by a
blind man's helplessness.

To be silent was natural to him, dark
or shine. Jukes at his elbow made him-
self heard, yelling cheerily in the gusts:
"We must have got the worst of it at
once, sir." A faint burst of lightning
quivered all round as if flashed into a
cavern — into a black and secret chamber
of the sea, with a floor of foaming crests.

It unveiled for a sinister, fluttering mo-
ment a ragged mass of clouds hanging
low, the lurch of the long outlines of the
ship, the black figures of men caught on
the bridge, heads forward, as if petrified
in the act of butting. The darkness paK
pitated down upon all this, and then the
real thing came at last

y

IT was something formidable and swift,
like the sudden smashing of a Vial of
Wrath. It seemed to explode all round
the ship with an overpowering concussion
and a rush of great waters, as if an im-
mense dam had been blown up to wind-
ward. It destroyed at once the organised
life of the ship by its scattering effect. In
an instant the men lost touch of each
other. This is the disintegrating power
of a great wind. It isolates one from
one's kind. An earthquake, a landslip,
an avalanche, overtake a man incident-
ally, as it were — without passion. A
furious gale attacks him like a personal
enemy, tries to grasp his limbs, fastens
upon his mind, seeks to rout his very
spirit out of him.

Jukes was driven away from fais com*

77

78 Typhoon

mander. He fancied himself whirled a
great distance through the air. Every-
thing disappeared, even for a moment his
power of thinking, but his hand had found
within six feet of him one of the rail-
Btanchions. This he embraced with the
ardour of love that will not be thwarted.
It saved his body and steadied his soul so
far that it became conscious of an intoler*
able distress. It was by no means allevi-
ated by an inclination to disbelieve the
reality of this experience. Though young,
he had seen some bad weather and had
never doubted his ability to imagine the
worst ; but this was so much beyond his
powers of fancy that it appeared incom-
patible with the existence of any ship
whatever. He would have been incred-
ulous about himself in the same way, per-
haps, had he not been so greatly harassed
by the necessity of exerting a continuous
wrestling effort against a force trying to
tear him away from his hold. Moreover,
the conviction of not beinc; utterly de«

Typhoon 79

stroyed returned to him through the sens-
ations of being half drowned, bestially
shaken, and partly choked. He thought :
"Heavens! What's this?"

It seemed to him he remained there pre-
cariously alone with the stanchion for a
long, long time. The rain poured on him,
flowed, drove in sheets. He was plunged
in rushing water like a diver holding on to
a stake planted in the bed of a swollen
river. He breathed in gasps, and some-
times the -water he swallowed was fresh,
and sometimes it was salt. For the most
part he kept his eyes shut tight, as if sus-
pecting his sight might be destroyed in
the immense flurry of the elements.
When he ventured to blink hastily, he
derived some moral support from the
green gleam of the starboard light shining
feebly upon the flight of rain and sprays.
He was actually looking at it when its ray
fell upon the uprearing head of the sea
which put it out. He saw the head of
the wave topple over, adding the mite of

m,v

80 Typhoon

its crash to the tremendous uproar raging
around him, and almost at the same in-
stant the stanchion was wrenched from his
grasp. After a crushing thump on his
back he found himself suddenly afloat and
borne away. His first irresistible notion
was that the whole China Sea had climbed
on the bridge. Then, more sanely, he
concluded himself gone overboard. All
the time he was being tossed, flung, and
rolled in great volumes of water, he kept
on repeating mentally, with t?he utmost
precipitation, the words : "My God ! My
God ! My God ! My God ! "

All at once, in a revolt of misery and
Jespair, he formed the crazy resolution to
get out of that. And he began to thresh
about with his arms and legs. But as
soon as he commenced his wretched
struggles he discovered himself to have
become somehow mixed up with a face,
an oilskin coat, somebody's boots. He
clawed ferociously all these things in turn,
lost them, found them again, lost theoa

<1

Typhoon 8t

once more, and was caught in the firm
clasp of a pair of stout arms. He re*
turned the embrace closely round a thick,
soft body. He had found his Captain.

They tumbled over and over each
other, tightening their hug. Suddenly
the water let them down with a brutal
bang^ and, stranded against the side of
the wheel-house, out of breath and
bruised, they were left to stagger up in
the wind and hold on where they
could.

Jukes came out of it rather horrified, as
though he had just escaped some unparal-
lelled outrage directed at his feelings. It
had weakened his faith in himself. He
started, shouting aimlessly to the man he
could feel near him in that fiendish black-
ness, "Is it you, sir? Is it you, sir? " till
his temples seemed ready to burst. And
he heard In answer a voice, as if crying far
^way, as if screaming to him fretfully
from a very great distance the one word,
"Yes!" It was this tinge of irritation

6

^

82 Typhoon

which silenced him rather than the dif-
ficulty of making himself heard. Other
seas swept again over the bridge. He re-
ceived them defencelessly right over his
bare head, with both his hands engaged
in holding.

The motion of the ship was extrava-
gant. Her lurches had an appalling help-
lessness ; she pitched, as if taking a header
into a void and seemed to find a wall to
hit every time. When she rolled she fell
on her side headlong as if she were begin-
ning to tumble, turning down a slope, and
she would be righted by such a demolish-
ing blow that Jukes felt her reeling as a
clubbed man reels before he collapses. In
the darkness round her the gale howled
and scuffled about gigantically, as though
the entire world were a black gully. At
certain moments the air would stream
against the ship as if sucked through a
tunnel with a concentrated, solid force of
impact that seemed to lift her clean out of
the water, and to keep her up for an in-

Typhoon 83

stant with only a quiver running through
her from end to end. And then she
would begin her tumbling again as if
dropped back into a boiling caldron.
Jukes tried hard to compose his mind and
judg^ things coolly.

Both ends of the Nan-Shan were under
water, as though she had no more free-
board than a raft. The sea, flattened
down in the heavier gusts, would uprise
and overwhelm them in snowy rushes of
foam expanding wide, beyond both rails,
into the night. And on this dazzling
sheet, spread under the blackness of the
clouds and emitting a bluish glow. Cap-
tain MacWhirr could catch a desolate
glimpse of a few tiny specks black as eb-
ony, the tops of the hatches, the battened
companions, the heads of the covered
winches, the foot of a mast. This was all
he could see of his ship. Her middle
structure — covered by the bridge which
bore him, his mate, the dark wheel-house
where a man was steering, shut up with

84 Typhoon

the fear of being swept overboard to-
gether with the whole thing in one great
crash — her middle structure was like a
half-tide rock awash upon a coast. It was
like an outlying rock in the night» with
the water boiling up, streaming over,
pouring off, beating round— like a rock in
the surf to which shipwrecked people cling
before they let go — only it rose, it sank, it
rolled continuously, without respite and
rest, like a rock that had miraculously
struck adrift from a coast and gone wal-
lowing upon the sea.

She was being looted with a senseless,
destructive fury; trysails torn out from
the extra gaskets, double-lashed awnings
blown away, bridge swept clean, weather-
cloths burst, rails twisted, light-screens
smashed — and two of the boats had gone
already. They had gone unheard and
unseen, melting, as it were, in the shock
and smother of the wave. It was only
later, when, upon the white flash of an-
other high sea hurling itself amidships.

Typhoon 85

Jukes had a rapid vision of two pairs of
davits leaping black and empty out of the
solid blackness, with one overhauled fall
flying and an iron-bound block threshing
in the wind, that he became aware of
what had happened within about three
yards of his back.

He poked his head forward, groping for
the ear of his commander. His lips
touched it — big, fleshy, very wet. He
cried in an agitated tone :

"The boats are going now, sir."
And again he heard that voice, distinct
and faint, forced and ringing feebly, but
with a penetrating effect of quietness in
the enormous discord of noises, as if sent
out from some remote spot of peace be-
yond the black wastes of the gale ; again
he heard a man's voice, — the frail and in-
domitable ^ound that can be made to
cirry an infinity of thought, resolution,
and purpose, that shall be pronouncing
confident words on the last day, when
heavens fall and justice is done, — and it

^

86 Typhoon

was crying to him as if from very, very
far:— "All right/'

Jukes thought he had not managed to
make himself understood.

**Our boats — I say boats — the boats,
sir! Two gone!"

The same voice, within a foot of him,
and yet so remote, yelled sensibly :

•Xan't be helped."

Captain Mac Whirr had never turned his
face, but Jukes caught some more words
on the wind.

"What can — expect — Hammering
through — Such — Bound to leave — some-
thing behind — Stands to reason."

Watchfully Jukes listened for more.
No more came. This was all Captain
MacWhirr had to say; and Jukes could
picture to himself rather than see the
broad squat back before him. An im-
penetrable obscurity pressing down upoq
the ghostly glimmers of the sea harboured
the mysterious madness of all this rush,
deluge, and uproar. Suddenly Jukes im-

Typhoon 87

agined himself completely indifferent to it
all. It was too much. A sort of dull con-
viction seized upon him that there was
nothing to be done.

If the steering-gear did not give way, if
the sea did not burst the deck in or smash
one of the hatches, if the engines did not
give up, if way could be kept on her
against this terrific wind, and she did not
bury herself in one of these awful seas, of
whose white crests alone, topping high
above her bows, he could now and then
get a sickening glimpse, — then there was
a chance of her coming out of it. Some-
thing within him seemed to turn over,
bringing uppermost the feeling that the
ship was lost.

** She's done for," he said to himself
with a surprising mental agitation, as
though he had discovered an unexpected
meaning in this thought. One of these
things was bound to happen. Nothing
could be prevented now and nothing could
be remedied. The men on board did not

88 Typhoon

count, and the ship could not last. ThU
weather was too impossible.

It was like the maddest of dreams: a
dream in which you inhabit a world ready
to fly to pieces and are jostled rudely
against a man you cannot see. Jukes felt
an arm thrown heavily over his shoulders.
And to this overture he responded with
great intelligence by catching hold of his
Captain round the waist.

They stood clasped thus in the blind
night, bracing each other against the
wind, cheek to cheek and lip to ear, in
the manner of two battered hulks lashed
stem-to-stern together.

XI

JUKES heard the voice of his com-
mander hardly any louder than be-
fore, but nearer, as though, starting to
march athwart the prodigious rush of the
hurricane, it had approached him, bearing
that strange eflfect of quietness like the
serene glow of a halo.

** D' ye know where the hands got to? "
it asked, vigorous and evanescent at the
same time, overcoming the strength of
the wind, and swept away from Jukes in-
stantly.

Jukes did n't know. They were all on
the bridge when the real force of the hur-
ricane struck the ship. He had no idea
where they had crawled to. Under the
drcumstances they were nowhere, for all
the use that could be made of them.
Somehow the Captain's wish to know dis-

«

tressed Jukes.

•9

90 Typhoon

"Want the hands, sir?" he cried, ap-
prehensively.

** Ought to know," asserted Captain
MacWhirr. 'VHold hard."

They held hard. An outburst of un-
chained fury, a vicious rush of the wind,
absolutely steadied the ship. Her dis-
ordered motion was checked and she only
rolled short and swift ; she rocked quick
and light like a child's cradle for a terrific
moment of suspense, while the whole at-
mosphere, as it seemed, streamed furi-
ously past her, roaring away from the
tenebrous earth.

It suffocated them, and with eyes shut
they tightened their grasp. What, from
the magnitude of the shock, might have
been a column of water, running upright
in the dark, butted against the ship, broke
short, and fell on her bridge, crushingly
from on high, with a dead, burying
weight.

A flying fragment of that collapse, a
mere splash, enveloped them in one swir'

Typhoon 91

froiA their feet over their heads, violently,
filling their ears, mouths, and nostrils
with salt water. It knocked out their
legs, wrenched hastily at their arms,
seethed away swiftly under their chins,
and opening their eyes they saw the piled-
up masses of foam dashing to and fro
amongst what looked like the fragments
of a ship. She had given way as if driven
straight in. They had felt her give under
them, and in their panting breasts their
hearts yielded, too, before the tremendov9
blow; and all at once she sprang up to
her desperate plunging as if trying to
scramble out from under the ruins.

The seas in the dark seemed to rush
from all sides to keep her back where she
might parish. There was hate in the way
she was handled, and a ferocity in the
blows that fell. She was like a living
creature thrown to the rage of a mob:
hustled terribly, struck at, borne up,
flung down, leaped upon. Captain Mac-
Whirr and Jukes kept hold of each other^.

92 Typhoon

deafened by the noise, gagged by the
wind ; and the great physical tumult beat-
ing about their bodies brought, like an
unbridled display of passion, a profound
trouble to their souls. One of those wild
and appalling shrieks that are heard at
times passing mysteriously overhead in
the steady roar of a hurricane, like a long
scream of pain from something living, im«
mense and tormented, swooped, as if
borne on wings, upon the ship, and Juke^
tried to outscream it.

"Will she live?"

The cry was wrenched out of his breast
It was as unintentional as the birth of a
thought in the head, and he heard no<
thing of it himself. It all became extinct
at once — thought, intention, effort; and
of his cry the inaudible vibration added to
the tempest-waves of the air.

He expected nothing from it — nothing
at all. For, indeed, what answer could be
made? But after a while he heard with
amazement the frail and resisting voice ia

Typhoon 93

his ear, — the dwarf sound, unconquered
in the giant tumult, —

"She may!"

It was a dull yell, more difficult to seize
than a whisper, -^the unsubstantial and
passing shadow of a yell. Jukes accepted
it with bitterness. And presently the
voice returned again, half submerged in
the vast crashes, like a ship battling
against the waves of an ocean.

•* Let's hope so!" it cried, small,
lonely, and unmoved, a stranger to the
visions of hope or fear, and it flickered
into disconnected words: "Ship— This
— Never — Anyhow — For the best."
Jukes gave it up contemptuously.

And then, as if it had come suddenly
upon the one thing fit to withstand the
power of a storm, it seemed to gain force
and firmness for the last broken shouts :

"Keep on hammering — builders — Good
men — Ar„i chance it — Rout — Engine
Good man/'

XII

CAPTAIN MacWHIRR removed his
arm from Jukes's shoulders and
thereby ceased to exist for his mate, so
dark it was. Jukes experienced a great
deception, as though of undeniable right
he had expected to obtain an utterance of
precise effect. After a tense stiffening of
every muscle he would let himself go limp
all over. The gnawing of profound dis-
comfort existed side by side with an in-
credible disposition to somnolence, as
though he had been buffeted and worried
into drowsiness. The wind would get
hold of his head and try to shake it off
his shoulders; his clothes, full of water,
were as heavy as lead, stiff like sheet-iron,
cold and dripping like an armour of melt-
ing ice: he shivered. It lasted a long
time ; and, with his hands contracted by

94

Typhoon 95

cramp closed hard on his hold, he was
letting himself sink slowly into the depths
of bodily misery. There was no sugges-
tion of end to it, as there is no end to the
horror of a nightmare. Jukes's mind be-
came concentrated upon himself in an
aimless, idle way, and when something
pushed lightly at the back of his knees he
nearly, as the saying is, jumped out of his
skin.

In the start forward he bumped the
back of Captain MacWhirr, who did n't
move, and then a hand gripped his thigh.
A lull hac} come, a menacing lull of the
wind, the holding of a stormy breath —
and he felt himself pawed all over. It
was the boatswain. He had recognised
the hands, so thick and enormous that
they seemed to belong to some new
species of man.

The boatswain had arrived on the
bridge, crawling on all fours against the
wind, and had found the chief mate's legs
with the top of his head. Immediately

9^ Typhoon

he crouched and began to explore Jukes*s
person upwards, with clumsy, prudent,
apologetic touches, as became an inferior

He was an ill-favoured, undersized,
gruff sailor of fifty, coarsely hairy, short
legged, long-armed, resembling an elderly
ape. His strength was immense; and in
his great lumpy paws, bulging like brown
boxing-gloves on the end of his furry fore-
arms, the heaviest objects were handled
like playthings. Apart from the grizzled
pelt on his chest, the menacing de-
meanour, and the hoarse voice, he had
none of the classical attributes of his rat-
ing. His good nature amounted almost
to imbecility; the men did what they
liked with him, and he had not an ounce
of initiative in his character, which was
easy-going and talkative. For these rea-
sons Jukes naturally disliked him; but
Captain MacWhirr, to Jukes's scornful
disgust, seemed to regard him as a first-
rate petty officer.

He pulled himself up by Jukes's coat.

V

Typhoon 97 \

taking that liberty with the greatest mod-
eration, and only so far as it was forced
upon him by the hurricane, "What is it,
bo's'n, what is it?" yelled Jukes, impa-
tient with the foreboding of some odious
trouble. What could that fraud of a
bo's'n want on the bridge? The typhoon
had got on Jukes's nerves. The husky
bellowings of the other, though unintelli-
gible, seemed to suggest a state of lively
satisfaction. There could be no mistake.
The old fool was pleased with something.
The boatswain's other hand had found
some other body, for in a changed tone
he began to inquire: "Is it you, sir? Is
It you, sir?" The wind strangled his
\iowls.

"Yes! "cried Captain MacWhirr.

f

s

/ \

XIII

ALL that the boatswain, out of a
superabundance of yells, could
make clear to Captain Mac Whirr was the
bizarre intelligence that ''AH them
Chinamen in the fore 'tween-deck had
fetched away, sir." Jukes, to leeward,
could hear these two shouting within six
inches of his face, as you may hear on a
still night half a mile away two men con-
versing across a field. He heard Captain
MacWhirr's exasperated ''What? —
What?" and the strained pitch of the
other's hoarseness. "In a lump . . .
seen . . . myself. Awful sight, sir
. thought . . . tell you."
Jukes remained indifferent in the over-
powering force of the hurricane, which
made the very thought of action utterly

vain. Besides, being very young, he had

98

Typhoon 99

/ound the occupation of keeping his heart
completely steeled against the worst so
full of excitement that he had come to
feel an impatient dislike towards any
other form of activity whatever. The im-
mediate peril had an atrocious side — the
violence, the darkness, the uproar — which
made the business of enduring it all sur-
prisingly engrossing. He was n't in the
least scared ; he knew that very well ; and
the proof of it was that, firmly believing
he would never see another sunrise, he
could be now sitting down, in a manner
of speaking, as calm as pos^ble under
that belief.

These are the moments of do-nothing
heroics to which even good men surrender
at times. Many officers of ships can no
doubt recall a case in their experience
when just such a trance of confounded
stoicism would come 9II at once over a
whole ship*s company. The mere recol-
lection of such a passage is enough 1;o.
bring back all the original dismay. It fsi

loo Typhoon

difficult to allude to it without flinging
swear-words backwards into the past ; not
precisely at the men themselves, which
would be like throwing stones, but upon
the unhonoured memory at large.

Jukes, however, had no wide experi-
ence of men or storms. He conceived
himself to be calm — inexorably calm;
calm as the very statue of calmness in the
night and terror of a storm. It suited
him to be left alone thus, and it seemed
also as though really nothing more could
be required of him. But as a matter of
fact he was cowed ; not abjectly, but only
so far as a decent man may, without be-
coming loathsome to himself.

It was rather like a forced-on numbness
of spirit. The long, long stress of a gale
does it ; the suspense of the interminably
culminating catastrophe; the trial of sus-
tained violence going on endlessly, as
though time itself were hurled upon one ;
the formidable hint of annihilation in the
j^^eep and roar of the wind. And there

Typhoon loi

is a bodily fatigue in the mere holding on
to existence within the excessive tumult ;
a searching and insidious fatigue that
penetrates deep into a man's breast to
cast down and sadden his heart, which is
incorrigible, and of all the gifts of the
earth — even before life itself — aspires to
peace.

Jukes was benumbed much more than
he supposed. He stood very wet, very
cold, stiff in every limb, and in a momen*
tary hallucination of swift visions (it is
said a drowning man thus reviews all his
life) he was run up against by memories
altogether unconnected with his present
situation. He remembered his father, for
instance ; a worthy but - fanciful business
man, who, at an unfortunate crisis in his
affairs, went quietly to bed and died forth<^
with in a state of resignation. Jukes did
not recall these circumstances, of course;
but, remaining otherwise unconcerned, he
remembered distinctly the poor man's
face, a certain game of nap played when

I02 Typhoon

quite a boy in Table Bay, on board a ship
since lost with all hands, the thick eye-
brows of his first skipper; and, without
any emotion, as he might years ago have
walked listlessly into her room and seen
her sitting there with a book, he remem-
bered his mother, — dead, too, now, — the
resolute woman left badly ofif, who had
been very firm in his bringing up.

It could not have lasted more than a
second, perhaps not so much. A heavy
arm had fallen about his shoulders ; Cap-
tain MacWhirr's voice was speaking his
name into his ear. ** Jukes! Jukes!"

He detected the tone of deep concern.
The wind had thrown its weight on the
ship, trying to pin her down amongst the
seas. They made a clean breach over her
as over a deep-swimming log; and the
gathered weight of crashes menaced mon-
strously from afar. They flung out of the
night with a ghostly light on their crests,
the light of sea-foam that in an expand-
ing, boiling up, pale flash showed upon

Typhoon 103

the slender body of the ship the toppling
rush, the downfall, and the seething, mad
scurry of each wave. Never for a moment
could she shake herself clear of the water.
Jukes, rigid, perceived in her motion the
ominous sign of haphazard floundering.
She was no longer struggling intelligently.
It was like the beginning of the end ; and
the note of busy concern in Captain Mac-
Whirr's voice sickened him like an exhi-
bition of blind and pernicious folly.

The spell of the storm had fallen upon
Jukes. He was penetrated by it, ab«
sorbed by it ; he was rooted in it with a
rigour of dumb attention. Captain Mac-
Whirr persisted in his cries, but the wind
got between them like a solid wedge.
He hung round Jukes's neck as heavy as
a stone, and suddenly the sides of the;*r
heads knocked together. "Jukes. Mr.
Jukes — I say."

He had to answer that voice that would
not be silenced. He answered in the cus-
tomary manner: "Yes, sir.''

/

I04 Typhoon

An4 directly his heart, corrupted by
the storm that breeds a craving for peace,
rebelled desperately against the tyranny
of training and command.

XIV

CAPTAIN MacWHIRR continued
his efforts. He had his mate's head
fixed firm in the crook of his elbow and
pressed it to his yelling lips mysteriously.
Sometimes Jukes would break in, admon^
ishing hastily, "Look out, sir"; or Cap-
tain MacWhirr would bawl an earnest
exhortation to "Hold hard, there," and
the whole black universe seemed to reel
together with the ship. They paused.
She floated yet. And Captain MacWhirr
would resume his shouts. **• . . Says
— whole lot — fetched away
ought to see • • • what 's the mat-
ter? "

At the beg[inning of the gale all hands
had taken refuge in the port alleyway. It
had a door aft, which they shut; it was

very dark, cold, and dismal there. At a

X05

io6 Typhoon

heavy fling of the ship they would groan
all together in the dark, and there were
uneasy mutters' when an exceptionally
heavy sea boarded the ship and tons of
water could be heard scuttling about as
if trying to get at them. The boatswain
was keeping up a gruff talk, but a more
unreasonable lot of men, he said after-
wards, he had never been with. They
were snug enough there out of harm's
way, and not wanted to do anything
either, and yet they did nothing but
grumble and complain peevishly like so
many sick kids. Finally one of them said
that if there had been at least some light
to see each other's noses by it would not
be so bad. It was making him crazy, he
declared, to lie there in the dark waiting
for the blamed hooker to sink. "Why
don't you go outside, then, and be done
with it?" the boatswain turned on him.

This called up general execration. The
boatswain found himself overwhelmed
with reproaches of all sorts. They seemed

Typhoon 107

to take it ill that a lamp was not instantly
created for them out of nothing. They
would whine after a light to get drowned
by — anyhow ! And though the unreason
of their revilings was patent, since no one
could hope to reach the lamp-room, which
was forward, he became greatly distressed.
He did not think it was decent of them to
nag at him like this. He said so and was
met by a general contumely. He sought
refuge, therefore, in an embittered silence«
Their grumbling and sighing and mutter-
ing worried him greatly, but by-and-by it
occurred to him that there were six globe
lamps hung in the 'tween-deck and that
there could be no harm in depriving the
coolies of one of them.

The Nan-Shan had an athwartship
bunker which, being frequently used as
cargo space, communicated by an iron
door with the fore 'tween-deck. Its man*
hole was the foremost one in the alley-
way. The boatswain could gefc in, there-
fore, without coming out on deck at all;

io8 Typhoon

but, to his great surprise, he found he
could induce no one to help him in taking
off the manhole cover. He groped for it
all the same, but one of the crew lying in
his way refused to budge. **Why! I
only want to get you that blamed light
you are crying for," he expostulated, aK
most pitifully. Somebody told him to go
and put his head in a bag. He regretted
he could not recognise the voice and that
it was too dark to see, otherwise, as he
said, he would have put a head on thai
son of a sea-cook, anyway, sink or swim.
Nevertheless, he had made up his mind
to show them he could get light, if he
were to die for it. Through the violence
of the ship's rolling, every movement was
dangerous. To be lying down seemed
labour enough. He nearly broke his neck
dropping into the bunker. He said he
fell down, and was kept shooting from
side to side in the dangerous company of
a heavy iron bar — a coal-trimmer's slice
probably — left down there by somebody.

Typhoon 109

This thing made him as nervous as though
it had been a wild beast. He could not
see it, the inside of the bunker coated
with coal dust being perfectly and im-
penetrably black, but he heard it sliding
and clattering and striking, here and
there, always in the neighbourhood of his
head. It seemed to make an extraordv-
nary noise, too, to give heavy thumps as
though it had been as big as a bridge
girder. This was remarkable enough for
him to notice while he was flutig from
port to starboard and back again, and
clawing desperately the smooth sides of
the bunker in the endeavour to stop him-
self. The door into the 'tween-deck not
fitting quite true, he saw a thread of dim
light at the bottom.

Being a sailor and a still active man, he
did not want much of a chance to regain
his feet; and, as luck would have it, in
scrambling up he put his hand on the iron
slice, picking it up as he rose. Otherwise
he would have been afraid of the thing

I lo Typhoon

breaking his legs or at least knocking him
down again. At first he stood still. He
felt unsafe in this darkness that seemed to
make the ship's motion unfamiliar, un-
foreseen, and difficult to counteract. He
felt so much shaken for a moment that he
dared not move for fear of "taking charge
again." He had no mind to get battered
to pieces in that bunker.

He had hit his head twice; he was
dazed a little. He seemed to hear yet so
plainly the clatter and bangs of the iron
slice flying about his ears that he tight-
ened his grip to prove to himself he had
it there safe in his hand. He was vaguely
amazed at the plainness with which down
there he could hear the gale raging. Its
howls and shrieks seemed .to take on in
the emptiness of the bunker something of
the human character, of human rage and
pain — being not vast, but infinitely poig-
nant. And there were, with every roll,
thumps, too, — profound, ponderous
thumps, as if a bulky object of five-ton

Typhoon 1 1 1

weight or so had got play in the hold.
But there was no such thing in the cargo.
Something on deck? Impossible. Or
alongside? Could n't be.

XV

HE thought all this quickly, clearly,
competently, like a seaman, and in
the end was puzzled. It occurred to him,
too, that the hands in the alleyway had
started scrambling and howling since be
had left them, in a sort of confused, up«
roarious way. But as the manhole had
remained open he ought to have heard
them more distinctly, much nearer, as it
were. This noise, though, came dead-
ened, from outside, together with the
washing and pouring of water on deck
above his head. Wind? Must be. It
made down there a row like the shouting
of a big lot of crazed men. And he dis-
covered in himself a desire for a light, too,
if only to get drowned by, and a nervous
anxiety to get out of that bunker as quick
as possible.

112

Typhoon 1 1 3

He pulled back the bolt ; the heavy iron
plate turned on its hinges;, and it was as
though he had opened the door to sounds
of the tempest. A gust of hoarse yelling
met him ; the air was still ; and the rush-
ing of water overhead was covered by a
tumult of strangled, throaty shrieks that
produced the effect of despejrate confu-
sion. He straddled his legs the whole
width of the doorway and stretched his
neck. And at first he perceived only
what he had come to seek — four small,
yellow flames swinging violently on the
great body of the dusk.

It was like the gallery of a mine, with
a row of stanchions in the middle and
cross-beams overhead, penetrating into
the gloom ahead — infinitely. And to port
there loomed like the caving in of one of
the sides a bulky mass with a slanting
outline. The whole place, with the shad-
ows and the shapes, moved all the time —
irresistibly. The boatswain glared; the
ship lurched to starboard and a great howl

8

114 Typhoon

came from that mass that had the slant of
fallen earth.

Pieces of wood whizzed past. Planks,
he thought, inexpressibly startled and
flinging back his head. At his feet a man
went sliding over, open-eyed, on his
back, straining with uplifted arms for
nothing ; and another came bounding like
a detached stone with his head between
his legs and his hands clenched. His
pigtail whipped in the air, he made a grab
at the boatswain's legs, and from his
opened hand a bright white disc rolled
against the boatswain's foot. He recog-
nised a silver dollar, as one would recog-
nise a familiar object in the improbabilities
of a nightmare.

He yelled at it with astonishment.
With a precipitated sound of trampling
and shuffling of bare feet and with gut-
tural cries, the vague mound piled up to
port, detached itself from the ship's side,
and shifted to starboard, sliding, inert
and struggling, to a dull, brutal thump

Typhoon 1 1 5

The cries ceased. The boatswain heard
a long moan, the roar and whistling of
the wind; he saw an inextricable con-
fusion of heads and shoulders, naked soles
kicking upwards, fists raised, tumbling
backs, legs, pigtails, faces. "Good
Lord!" he cried, horrified, and banged
to the iron door upon this vision.

This was what he had come on the
bridge to tell. He could not keep it to
himself, and on board ship there is only
one man to whom it is worth while to un-
burden yourself. On his passage back
the hands in the alleyway swore at him
for a fool. Why did n't he bring that
lamp? What the devil did coolies matter
to anybody? And when he came out the
extremity of the ship made what went
on inside of her appeeur indeed of little
moment.

At first he thought he had left the alley-
way in the very moment of her sinking.
* » The bridge ladders had been washed
away, but an enormous sea filling the

ii6 Typhoon

after-deck floated him up. After that he
had to lie on his stomach for some time,
holding to a ring-bolt, getting his breath
now and then, and swallowing salt water.
He struggled farther on his hands and
knees, too frightened and distracted to
turn back. In this way he reached the
after part of the wheel-house. In that
comparatively sheltered spot he found the
second mate. He was pleasantly sur-
prised, his impression being that every-
body on deck must have been washed
away a long time ago. He asked eagerly
where the Captain was.

The second mate was lying low, like a
malignant little animal under a hedge.
''Captain ? Gone overboard after getting
us into this mess." The mate, too, for
all he knew or cared. Another fool. They
would n't have a chance to kill any more
good men. Did n't matter. Everybody
was going by-and-by.

The boatswain crawled out again into
the strength of the wind ; not because he

Typhoon 1 1 7

much expected to find anybody, he said,
but just to get away from "that man,"
He crawled out as outcasts go to face an
inclement world. Hence his great joy at
finding Jukes and the Captain. But what
was going on in the 'tween-deck was to
him a minor matter by that time, like a
distant and still memory made more faint
by the exigencies of a turbulent existence.
Besides, it was difficult to make yourself
heard,. But he managed to convey the
idea that the Chinamen had broken adrift
and that he had come up on purpose to
report this. As to the hands, they were
all right. Then, almost appeased, he
subsided on the deck in a sitting posture,
hugging with his arms and legs the stand
of the engine-room telegraph — an iron
casting as thick as a post. When that
went — why, he expected he would go too.
He gave no more thought to the coolies.
Captain Mac Whirr made Jukes under-
stand he wanted him to go down below—
to see.

ii8 Typhoon

"What could I do, sir? "' and the trem*
bling of his whole wet body caused his
voice to sound like bleating.

''See! Bo's'n— says— adrift."

"That bo's*n is a confounded fool/*
howled Jukes shakily.

What was the good of going to see?
He did n't want to see. What could
one do single-handed with two hundred
Chinamen? It was impossible to make
that man understand the most obvious
things. The absurdity of the demand
made upon him revolted Jukes. He was
as unwilling to go as if the moment he
had left the deck the ship were sure to
sink.

"I must know— can't leave "

"They '11 settle, sir."

"Fight — boVn says fight — Why?
Can't have — fighting — board ship. . . .
Rather keep you here — case — I should —
washed overboard myself. • . . Stop
it — some way — You see and tell me —
through engine-room tube. • . . Don't

Typhoon 119

want you — come up here — too often.
. . . Dangerous — moving about — deck.'"

JukeSy held with his head in chancery,
had to listen to what seemed horrible
suggestions.

"Don't want — you get lost — so long —
ship don't. . . . Rout — Good man
—Ship — through this — all right yet."

All at once Jukes understood he would
have to go.

"Do you think she will?" he screamed.

r

But the windy as if made angry by Cap-
tain Mac Whirr, seemed to throw itself at
them with redoubled force and devoured
the reply out of which Jukes heard only
the one word pronounced with great
energy.
". . . Always. . . .'*
Captain Mac Whirr released Jukes and,
bending over the boatswain, yelled, "Get
back with the mate." Jukes only knew
that the arm was gone off his shoulders.
He was dismissed with his orders — to do
what? He was exasperated into letting

$

1 20 Typhoon

go his hold carelessly and on the instant
was blown away. It seemed to him he
would be blown right over the stern. He
flung himself down and the boatswain,
who was following, fell on him.

"Don't you get up yet, sir," cried the
boatswain. ' * No hurry ! ' *

A sea swept over. Jukes understood
the boatswain to say that the bridge lad-
ders were gone. **I '11 lower you down,
sir, by your hands," he screamed. He
shouted also something about the smoke-
stack being as likely to go overboard as
not. Jukes thought it very possible and
imagined the fires out, the ship helpless
— ^and he down there. The boatswain by
his side kept on yelling. Was it a warn*
ing? " What ? What is it? " Jukes cried
distressfully, and the other repeated,
* ' What would my old woman say if she
saw me now?**

XVI

IN the alleyway, where a lot of watei
splashed in the dark, the men were
still as death, till Jukes stumbled against
one of them and cursed him savagely for
being in the way. Two or three voices
then asked, eager and weak, "Any chance
for us, sir?"

•'What 's the matter with you fools?"
he said brutally. He felt as though he
could throw himself down amongst them
and never move any more. But they
seemed cheered, and, in the midst of
warnings, "Look out!" — "Mind the
manhole lid, sir," they lowered him into
the bunker. The boatswain tumbled
down after him, and as soon as he had
picked himself up he remarked :

"She would say, 'Serve you right, you

old fool, for going to sea.

xaz

$ p»

122 Typhoon

The boatswain had some means, and
made a point of alluding to them fre-
quently. His wife — a fat woman — and
two grown-up daughters kept a green-
grocer's shop.

In the dark. Jukes, unsteady on his
legs, listened to a faint thunderous patter.
A deadened screaming went on steadily
at his elbow as it were; and from above
the louder tumult of the storm descended
upon these near sounds. His head swam.
To him, too, in that bunker, the motion
of the ship seemed novel and menacing,
sapping his resolution as though he had
never been afloat before.

He had half a mind to scramble out,
but the remembrance of Captain Mac-
Whirr's voice made this impossible. And
yet he felt he could do nothing. He had
an inclination to sit down, and the feeling
of helplessness in that beastly black hole
made him sick of his life. His orders
were to ^o and see. What was the good
of it? he wanted to know. Enraged, he

Typhoon 123

told himself he would see — of course.
But the boatswain, staggering clumsily,
warned him to be careful how he opened
that door ; there was a blamed fight going
on. And Jukes, as if in great bodily
pain, desired irritably to know what the
devil they were fighting for.

"Dollars. Dollars, sir. All them rot-
ten chests got burst open. Blamed money
skipping all over the place and they are
tumbling after it head over heels, tearing
and biting like anything. A regular little
hell in there."

Jukes convulsively opened the door.
The short boatswain by his side peered
too, like a curious baboon.

One of the lamps had gone out, broken
perhaps. Rancorous, guttural cries burst
out loudly on their ears, and a strange
panting sound, — the working of all these
straining breasts. A hard blow hit the
side of the ship ; water fell above with a
stunning shock, and in the forefront of the
gloom, where the air was reddish and

\

\

\

\

124 Typhoon

/ thick, Jukes saw a head bang the deck

violently, two thick calves waving, muscu-
lar arms twined round a naked body, a
yellow face open-mouthed and with a set,
wild stare look up and slide away. An
empty chest clattered, turning over, a
man fell head first with a jump as if lifted
by a kick; and further off, indistinct, a
mass of men streamed like rolling stones
down a bank, beating the deck with their
feet and flourishing their arms wildly.
The hatchway ladder was loaded with
coolies, swarming on it like bees on a
branch. They hung in a crawling, stirring
cluster, beating with their fists the under-
side of the battened hatch, and the head-
long rush of the water was heard in the
intervals of their yelling. The ship heeled
oyer more and they began to drop off;
first one, then two, then all the rest to-
gether, falling straight with a great cry.
Jukes was confounded. The boatswain,
with gruff anxiety, begged him, "Don't
you go in therfe, sir."

Typhoon 125

The whole place seemed to twist upon
itself, jumping incessantly the while, and
when the ship rose to a sea Jukes fancied
that all these men would be shot upon
him in a body. He swung the door to, and
with trembling hands pushed at the bolt.

As soon as his mate had gone, Captain
Mac Whirr sidled and staggered as far as
the wheel-h6use. Its door being hinged
forward, he had to fight the gale for ad-
mittance, and when at last he managed
to enter, it was as if he had been fired
through the wood. He stood within,
holding the handle.

The steering gear leaked steam and iti
the confined space the glass of the binnacU
made a shiny oval in a thin white fog.
The wind howled, hummed, whistled,
with sudden booming gusts that rattled
the doors and the shutters in the vicious
patter of sprays. Two coils of lead-line
and a small canvas bag hung on a long
lanyard swung wide off and came back»
clinging to the bulkheads. The gratings

V

I ^6 Typhoon

under foot were nearly afloat, with every
sweeping blow of a sea water squirted
violently through the cracks all round the
door, and the man at the helm had flung
down his cap, his coat, and stood propped
against the gear-casing in a striped cotton
shirt open on his breast. The little brass
wheel in his hands seemed a bright and
fragile toy. The cords of his neck stood
hard and lean, a deurk patch lay in the hoi*
low of his throat, and his face was still
and sunken as in death.

Captain Mac Whirr wiped his eyes. The
sea that had nearly taken him overboard
had to his great annoyance washed his
sou'wester hat off his bald head. The
flufiFy, fair hair, soaked and darkened, re-
sembled a mean skein of cotton threads
festooned round his bare skull. He
breathed heavily and his face, glistening
with sea water, was of a hot crimson with
the wind, with the sting of sprays. He
looked as though he had come off sweat-
ing from before a furnace.

N HIS HANDS SEEMED A BRIQHT AND

Typhoon 127

"You, here?" he muttered heavily.

The second mate had also found his
way into the wheel-house. He had fixed
himself in a corner with his knees up, a
fist pressed against each temple, and this
attitude suggested rage, sorrow, resigna-
tion, surrender, with a sort of concen-
trated unforgiveness. He said mournfully
and defiantly :

"My watch below now. Ain't it? "

The steam-gear clattered, stopped, clat-
tered again ; and the helmsman's eyeballs
seemed to project out of a hungry face,
as if the compass card behind the binnacle
glass had been meat. God knows how
long he had been there steering, as if for-
gotten by all his shipmates. The bells
had not been struck, there had been no
reliefs, the ship's routine had gone down
wind, but he was trying to keep her head
north-northeast. The rudder might have
been gone for all he knew, the fires out,
the engines broken down, the ship ready
to roll over like a corpse. He was anx-

128 Typhoon

ious not to get muddled and lose control
of her head, because the compass card
swung far both ways, wriggling on the
pivoty and sometimes seemed to whirl
right around. It was hard to make out the
course she was making. He suffered from
mental stress. He was horribly afraid
also of the wheel-house going. Mountains
of water kept on falling on it. When the
ship took one of her desperate dives the
corners of his lips twitched.

Captain MacWhirr looked up at the
wheel-house clock. Screwed to the bulk-
head, it had a white face, on which the
black hands appeared to stand quite still.
It was half-past one in the morning.

** Another day," he muttered to himself.
The second mate heard him and, lifting
his head as one grieving amongst ruins :

"You won't see it break," he ex-
claimed. His wrists and his knees could
be seen to shake violently. "No, by
God, you won't! . . ." He took his
head again between his fists.

T)rphoon 1 29

The body of the helmsman had moved
slightly, but his head did n't budge on
his necky — like a stone head fixed to
look one way from a column. During a
roll that all but took his booted legs
from under him, and in the very stagger to
save himself, Captain MacWhirr said
austerely :

"Don't you pay any attention to that

man."

And then, with an indefinable change
of tone, very grave, he added :

"He is n't on duty."

The sailor said nothing. The hurricane
boomed, shaking the little place, which
seemed air-tight; and the light of the
binnacle flickered all the time.

"You haven't been relieved," Captain
MacWhirr went on, looking down. "I
want you to stick on, though, as, long as
you can. You 've got the hang of her.
Another man coming here might make a
mess of it. Would n't do. No child's
play. And the hands are probably busy

1 30 Typhoon

with a job down below. . • • Think
you can?"

The steering-gear leaped into an abrupt
short clatter, stopped smouldering like an
ember, and the still man, with a motion-
less gaze, burst out as if all the passion
in him had gone into his lips :

' ' By heavens, sir, I can steer for ever if
you don't talk to me."

"Oh! Aye! All right. . . ." The
Captain lifted his eyes for the first time
to the man. . . . * ' Hackett. * '

And he seemed to dismiss this matter
from his mind. He stooped to the en-
gine-room speaking-tube, blew in, and
bent his head. Mr. Rout, below, an-
swered, and at once Captain Mac Whirr
put his lips to the 4nouthpiece.

XVII

WITH the uproar of the gale around
him he applied alternately his lips
and his ear, and the engineer's voice
mounted to him, harsh and as if out of
the heat of an engagement. One of the
stokers was disabled, the others had given
up, the second engineer and the donkey-
man were firing up. The third was stand-
ing by the steam valve. The engines
were being tended by hand. How was
it above?

"Bad enough. It rests with you," said
Captain Mac Whirr. Was the mate down
there yet? No? He would be presently.
Would Mr. Rout let him talk through
the speaking-tube. Through the deck
speaking-tube. Because he — the Captain
'—was going out again on the bridge
directly. There was some trouble with.

131

132 Typhoon

the Chinamen. They were fighting
amongst themselves. Could n't allow
fighting, anyhow.

Mr. Rout had gone away, and Captain
MacWhirr could feel against his ear the
pulsation of the engines like the beat of
the ship's heart. Mr. Rout's voice down
there cried something, distantly. The
ship pitched headlong, the pulsation
leaped with a hissing tumult and stopped
dead. Captain MacWhirr's face was im-
passive and his eyes were fixed aimlessly
at the crouching shape of the second
mate. Again Mr. Rout's voice cried out
in the depths, and the pulsating beat re-
commenced, with slow strokes — growing
swift.

Mr. Rout came back to the tube.

"It don't matter much what they
do," he said hastily; and then, with irri-
tation, "She takes these dives as if she
never meant to come up again."

"Awful sea," said the Captain's voice
from above.

«<

4 «

Typhoon 1 33

"Don't let me drive her under," barked
Solomon Rout up the pipe.

*'Dark and rain. Can't see what 's
coming," uttered the voice. "Must —
keep — her — moving — enough to steer —
and chance it/' it went on to state dis-
tinctly,

I am doing as much as I dare."
We are — getting — smashed up — a
good deal up here/' proceeded the voice
mildly. * * Doing — fairly well — though.
Of course, if the wheel-house should

go "

Mr. Rout, bending an attentive ear,
muttered peevishly something under his
breath.

But the deliberate voice up there be-
came animated to ask :

"Jukes turned up yet?" Then, after
a short wait: "I wish he would bear a
hand. I want him to be done and come
up here in case of anything — look after
the ship. I am all alone. The second
mate lost . • ."

134 Typhoon

'•What?'* shouted Mr. Rout into the
engine-room, taking his head away. Then
up the tube he cried, "Gone overboard? "
and clapped his ear to.

"Lost his nerve," the voice from above
was proceeding in a matter-of-fact tone.
"Damn awkward, this."

Mr. Rout, listening with bowed neck,
opened his eyes wide. However, he
heard something like the sounds of a
scufHe and broken exclamations coming
down to him. He strained his hearing,
and all the time Beale, the third engineer,
with his arms upraised, held between the
palms of his hands the rim of a little
black wheel projecting at the side, of a big
copper pipe. He seemed to be poising it
above his head, as though it were a cor-
rect attitude in some sort of game.

To steady himself he pressed his shoul-
der against the white bulkhead, with one
knee bent and a sweat-rag tucked in the
belt hung upon his hip. His smooth
cheek was begrimed and flushed, and the

Typhoon 135

coal-dust on his eyelids, like the black
pencilling of a make-up, enhanced the
liquid brilliance of the whites, giving to
his youthful face something of a feminine,
exotic, and fascinating aspect. When
the ship pitched he would with hasty
movements of his hands screw hard at
the little wheel.

"Gone crazy," began the Captain's
voice suddenly. ** Rushed at me — just
now. Had to knock him down — this
minute. You heard, Mr. Rout?"

"The devil!" muttered Mr. Rout.
' * Look out, Beale. * '

His voice rang out like the blast of a
warning trumpet between the iron walls
of the engine-room. Painted white, they
rose high into the dusk of the skylight,
sloping like a roof; and the whole lofty
space resembled a chamber in, a monu-
ment, divided by floors of iron grating,
with lights flickering at different levels,
and the still gloom within the columnar
stir of machinery under the motionless : I

^ -

13^ Typhoon

swelling of the cylinders. A loud and
wild resonance, made up of all the noises
of the hurricane, dwelt in the still warmth
of the air. There was in it the smell of
hot metal, of oil, and a slight mist of
steam. The blows of the sea seemed to
traverse it, in an unringing, stunning
shock, from side to side.

Gleams, like pale, long flames, trembled
upon the polish of metal, from the floor-
ing below the enormous crank-heads
emerged in their turns with a flash of
brass and steel — going over; while the
connecting rods, big-jointed, like skeleton
limbs, seemed to thrust them down and
pull them yp again with an irresistible
precision. And deep in the half-light
other rods dodged to and fro, crossheads
nodded quickly, disks of metal rubbed
against each other, swift and gentle in a
commingling of shadows and gleams.

» .

XVIII

SOMETIMES all those movements
would slow down simultaneously, as
if they had been the functions of a living
organism — powerful, silent, patient, and
unerring, but stricken suddenly by the
blight of languor; and Mr. Rout's eyes
(vould blaze darker in his long, pale face.
He was fighting this fight in a pair of car-
pet slippers. A short, shiny jacket barely
covered his loins, and his pale wrists pro-
truded far out of the tight sleeves as
though the emergency had added to his
stature, lengthened his limbs, augmented
his pallor, hollowed his eyes.

He moved, climbing high up, disap-
pearing low down, with a restless, pur-
poseful industry, and when he stood still,
holding the guard-rail in front of the
starting-gear, he would keep glancing to

137

1 38 Typhoon

the right at the steam-gauge, at the
water-gauge, upon the white wall in the
light of a swaying lamp. The mouths of
two speaking-tubes gaped stupidly at his
elbow, and the dial of the engine-room
telegraph resembled a clock of large di-
ameter, bearing on its face curt words in-
stead of figures. They stood out heavily
black, around the black pivot-head of the
solitary hand, emphatically symbolic of
loud exclamations : Ahead — Astern —
Slow — Half — Stand by • . • and the
fat black hand pointed down to the word
Full-— which, thus singled out, captured
the eye as a sharp cry secures attention.

The wood-encased bulk of the low-
pressure cylinder, frowning portly from
above, emitted a faint wheeze at every
thrust, and, except for that low hiss, the
engines worked their steel limbs headlong
or slow with a silent, determined smooth-
ness. And all this — the white walls, the
moving steel, the floor plates under Solo-
mon Rout's feet, the floors of iron grating

Typhoon 139

above his head, the, dusk and the gleams
— ^ uprose and sank continuously, with
one accord, upon the harsh wash of the
waves against the ship's side. The whole
loftiness of the place, booming hollow
to the great voice of the wind, swayed
at the top like a tree, would lay over
bodily, as if borne down this way and that
by tremendous blasts.

"You 've got to hurry up," shouted
Mr. Rout, as soon as he saw Jukes.

Jukes's glance was wandering and
tipsy, his red face was puffy, as though
he had overslept himself. He burst into
the engine-room like a man who had been
racing over hills and dales for his life.
He had had an arduous road and had
travelled over it with immense vivacity,
the agitation of his mind corresponding
to the scrambling exertions of his body.
He had rushed up out of the bunker —
stumbling in the alleyway amongst a lot
of bewildered men who, trod upon, asked
**What '9 up, sir?" in awed mutters all

140 Typhoon

round him in the dark— down into the
stoke-hole, missing many iron rungs in
his hurry, into a place deep as a well,
black as Tophet, narrow like a corridor,
tipping over back and forth like a seesaw.
Lumps of coal skipped to and fro from
end to end, rattling like an avalanche of
pebbles on a slope of iron.

Somebody in there moaned with pain,
and somebody else crouched over what
seemed the body of a man ; a lusty voice
blasphemed, and the glow under each fire-
grate was like a pool of flaming blood
radiating quietly in a velvety blackness.

A gust of wind struck upon the na[>e of
Jukes's neck, and next momen me felt it
streaming about his wet ankles The
stoke-hole ventilators hummed; and in
front of the six fire-doors two men,
stripped to the waist, staggered and
stopped, apparently wrestling with two
shovels.

"Hallo! Plenty of draught now,"
yelled the second at once, as though he

Typhoon 141

had been all the time looking out for
Jukes. The donkey*man, a dapper little
chap with a dazzling fair skin and a tiny,
gingery mustache, worked in a sort of
mute transport. They were keeping a
full head of steam, and a profound rum-
bling sound, as of an empty furniture van
trotting over a bridge, made a sustained
bass to all the other noises of the place.

"Blowing off all the time," went on
yelling the second. With a sound as of a
hundred scoured saucepans the orifice of
a ventilator spat upon his shoulder a
sudden gush of salt water, and he vol-
leyed a stream of curses upon all things
on earth, including his own soul ; ripping
and raving, and all the time attending to
his business. With a sharp clash of
metal, the ardent pale glare of the fire
opened upon his bullet head, showing his
spluttering lips, his insolent eyes, and
with a clash closed like the white-hot
wink of an iron eye.

*' Where 's the blooming ship? Can you

H2 * Typhoon

tell me — blast my eyes! Under water
— or what? Are the condemned cowls
gone to Hades, hey? Don't you know
anything — you jolly sailor-man, you?"

Jukes, after a bewildered moment, had
been helped by a roll to dart through,
and as soon as his eyes took in the com-
parative vastness, peace, and brilliance of
the engine-room, the ship, settling her
stem heavily in the water, sent him
charging head down upon Mr. Rout.

The chief's arm, long like a tentacle
and straightening as if worked by a
spring, went out to meet him and de-
flected his rush into a spia towards the
speaking-tubes. At the same time Mr.
Rout repeated earnestly:

"You 've got to hurry up — whatever it
is.''

, Jukes yelled, "Are you there, sir?"
and listened. Nothing. Suddenly the
roar of the wind fell straight into his ear,
but presently a small voice shoved aside
the shouting hurricane quietly :

\

Typhoon 143

**You, Jukes?— Well?"

Jukes was ready to talk; it was only
time that seemed to be wanting. And,
somehow, he mistrusted the ability of the
other man to understand. It was easy
enough to account for everything. He
could perfectly imagine the coolies bat-
tened down in the reeking 'tween-deck,
lying sick and scared between the rows of
chests. Then one of these chests, or per-
haps several at once breaking loose in a
roll, knocking out others, sides splitting,
lids flying open, and all these clumsy
Chinamen staggering up in a body tG
save their property. Afterwards, every
fling of the ship would hurl that tramp,
ing, yelling mob here and there, from side
to side, in a whirl of smashed wood, torn
clothing, rolling dollars. And a struggle
once started, they would be unable to
stop themselves. Nothing could stop
them now except main force. It was a
disaster. He had seen it, and that was
all he could say. Some of them must be

\

\
\

r r

1 44 Typhoon

dead, he believed. The rest would go on
fighting. . • •

He sent up his words tripping over each
other, crowding the narrow tube. They
mounted as if into a silence of an en-
lightened comprehension dwelling alone
up there with a storm. There was no
circumventing thi; development. And
he wanted to be dismissed from the face
of that odious trouble intruding on the
great need of the ship.

XIX

«

HE listened. Before his eyes the en«
gines turned with slow labour that
in the moment of going off into a mad
fling would stop dead at Mr. Rout's
shoi^ , * * Look out, Beale ! ' ' They seemed
to 4fsAt in an intelligent immobility stilled
in midstroke, a heavy crank arrested on
the cant, as if conscious of time itself be-
ing on their side. Then, with a "Now,
then! " from the chief and the sound of a
breath expelled through clenched teeth,
they would accomplish the interrupted
revolution and begin another.

There was the prudent sagacity of
enormous strength in their movements.
This was their work — this coaxing of a
ship over the fury of waves and into the
fierce eye of the wind. Mr. Rout's chin
had sunk on his breast, and at times he

to

145

146 Typhoon

watched them from under his forehead
like a man plunged deep in thought.

The voice that kept the hurricane out
of Jukes's ear began :

"Take the hands . . . " and left
off unexpectedly.

"What could I do with the hands,
sir? "

A harsh, abrupt, imperious clang ex-
ploded suddenly. The three pairs of
eyes flew up to the telegraph dial to see
the hand dart upwards from "Full" to
"Stop '* as if snatched by a devil. And
then these three men in the engine-room
had the intimate sensation of a check
upon the ship, of a strange shrinking, as
if she had gathered herself for a leap.

"Stop her! " bellowed Mr. Rout.

Nobody, — not even Captain Mac Whirr,
who caught sight of a white line of foam
coming on at such a height that he
could n't believe his eyes, — nobody knew
the steepness of that sea and the awful
depth of the hollow the hurricane had

Typhoon i47

scooped behind that running wall of
water.

It raced to meet the ship, and, with a
pause, as of girding the loins, she lifted
her bows and leaped. The flames in all
the lamps sank, darkening the engine-
room. One went out. She had not
leaped quite high enough, for with a tear-
ing crash and a swirling, raving tumult,
tons of water fell upon her deck as though
she had darted under the very foot of a
cataract.

Down there they looked at each other,
stunned.

* * Swept from end to end, by God ! ' '
bawled Jukes.

She pitched into the hollow straight
down as if tumbling from a cliff. The
engine-room toppled forward menacingly,
like the inside of a tower nodding in an
earthquake. An awful racket of iron
things falling came from the stoke-hole.

Instead of recovering herself she hung
head down while the souls of men on

148 Typhoon

board cried aloud to her to rise. She
hung long enough for Beale to drop on
his hands and knees as if he meant to fly
on all fours out of the engine-room, and
for Mr. Rout to turn his head slowly,
rigid, cavernous, with the lower jaw
dropping. Jukes had shut his eyes, and
his face in a moment became hopelessly
blank, like the face of a blind man.

But she rose slowly, staggering as if she
had to lift a mountain with her bows.

Mr. Rout shut his mouth, Jukes
blinked, and little Beale stood up hastily.

"Another one like this and that 's the
last of her! " cried the chief.

He and Jukes looked at each other, and
the same thought came into their heads —
the Captain ! Everything must have been
swept away. Steering-gear gone — men
gone — ship like a log. All over directly.

"Rush! '* ejaculated Mr. Rout thickly,
glaring with enlarged, doubtful eyes at
Jukes, who answered him by an irresolute
glance.

HB AND JUK£8 LOOKED AT EAOH OTHEtL"

a «

Typhoon 149

The clang of the telegraph gong soothed
them instantly. The black hand dropped
in a flash from "Stop" to "Full."

"Now then, Beale! " cried Mr. kout.

The steam hissed low. The piston-rods
slid in and out. Jukes put his ear to the
tube. The voice was ready for him. It
said:

"Pick up all the money. Bear a hand
now. I '11 want you up here." And that
Was all.

"Sir?" called up Jukes. There was no
answer. It struck him that if he had got
an answer he would n't have known what
to say. Nothing could be said.

He staggered away as a defeated man
staggers away from the field of battle.
He had got in some way or other a cut
above his left eyebrow, a cut to the bone.
He was not aware of it in the least:
quantities of the China Sea, large enough
to break his neck for him, had gone over
his head, had cleaned, washed, and salted
that wound. It did not bleed* but only

1 50 Typhoon

gaped red; and this gash over the eye,
his dishevelled hair, the disorder of his
streaming clothes, gave him the aspect of
a man worsted in a fight with fists.

"Got to pick up the dollars," he ap-
pealed to Mr. Rout, smiling pitifully, at
random.

"What 's that? Pick up ... ?
I don't care . . ." Then quivering
in every muscle, but with an exaggeration
of paternal tone, "Go away now, for
God's sake. You deck people '11 driv^
me silly. There 's that second mate been
going for the old man. Don't you know?
You fellows are going wrong for want of
something to do . . ."

At these words Jukes discovered in
himself the beginnings of anger. He
turned to go the way he had come, full
of hot scorn for the chief. In the stoke-
hole the plump donkey -man manoeuvred
his shovel mutely, as if his tongue had
been cut out; but the second was carry-
ing on like a sort of noisy, undaunted

Typhoon 15^

maniac, who, nevertheless, had preserved
his skill in the art of stoking under a
marine boiler.

"Hallo, you wandering officer! Hey!
Can't you get some of your slush-slingers
to wind up a few of them ashes? I am
getting choked with them here. Curse
it! Hallo! Hey! Remember the ar-
ticles! — 'sailors and firemen to assist each
other.* Hey! D' ye hear? "

Jukes was climbing out frantically, and
the other, lifting up his face after him,
howled :

"Can't you speak? What are you pok-
ing about here for? What 's your game,
anyhow?"

A frenzy possessed Jukes. By the time
he was back amongst the men in the dark-
ness of the alleyway he felt ready to wring
ail their necks at the slightest sign of
hanging back. The very thought of it
exasperated him. He could n't hang
^> back. They should n't!

XX

TH E impetuosity with which he came
amongst them carried them along.
They had already been excited and
startled at all his comings and goings.
By the fierceness and rapidity of his
movements, more felt than seen in his
rushes, he appeared formidable — busied
with matters of life and death that
brooked no delay. At his first word he
heard them drop into the bunker one
after another obediently, with heavy
thumps.

They were not clear as to what would
have to be done. "What is it? What
is it?" they were asking each other. The
boatswain tried to explain ; the sounds of
a great scufHe surprised them; and the
mighty shocks reverberating awfully in
the black bunker made them think fear

15a

Typhoon 153

fully of the gale. When the boatswain
threw open the door it seemed to them
that an eddy of the hurricane stealing
through the iron sides of the ship had set
all the coolies whirling like dust: there
came to them a confused uproar, a tem-
pestuous tumult, a fierce mutter, gusts of
screams dying away, and the tramping of
feet mingling with the blows of the sea.

For a moment they glared, blocking
the doorway. Jukes pushed through
them brutally. He said nothing and
simply darted in. The Chinamen on the
ladder, struggling suicidally to break
through the battened hatch to a swamped
deck, fell off, and he disappeared under
them like a man overtaken by an ava^
lanche. The boatswain yelled excitedly :

"Come along! Get the mate! He'll
be trampled to death. Come on ! "

They rushed in, stamping on breasts,
on fingers, on faces, catching their feet
in heaps of clothing, kicking broken
wood ; but before they could get hold of

1 54 Typhoon

him Jukes emerged, waist-deep amongst
clawing hands. In the instant he had
been lost to view all the buttons of his
jacket had gone, its back got split up to
the collar, his waistcoat had been torn
open. The central, struggling mass went
over to the roll, dark, indistinct, helpless,
with a wild gleam of eyes in the dim light
that swayed after it and jerked when it
thumped the ship's side.

** Leave me alone — damn you!"
screeched Jukes. "Drive them forward!
Watch your chance when she pitches.
Forward with them ! Drive them against
the bulkhead! Jam 'em up!"

The rushing of these eleven men into
the seething 'tween - deck was like a
splash of cold water into a boiling caldron.
The commotion as it were sank for a
moment.

The bulk of Chinamen were locked in
such a compact scrimmage that, linking
their arms and aided by an appalling dive
of the ship, the seamen sent it forward in

Typhoon 15S

one great shove', like a solid block. Be-
hind their backs small clusters and loose
bodies tumbled from side to side.

The boatswain performed prodigious
feats of strength. With his long arms
open and each . great paw clutching at
a stanchion, he stopped the rush of
seven entwined Chinamen rolling like
a boulder. His joints cracked ; he said,
•*Ha!" and they flew apart. But the
carpenter showed the greater intelligence.
He went back into the alleyway, where
he found several coils of cargo gear,
chain, and rope. With these, life-lines
were rigged.

There was really no resistance. The
struggle, however it began, had turned
into a scramble of blind panic. If they
had started after their dollai;3, they were
by that time fighting only for their foot-
ing. They would take each other by the
throat merely to save themselves from be-
ing hurled about. Whoever got a hold
anywhere would kick at the others who

156 Typhoon

caught at his legs and hung on, till a roll
sent them flying together across the deck.

The coming of the white devils was a
terror. Had they come to kill? Those
torn out of the ruck became very limp in
the seamen's hands; some, dragged aside
by the heels, were passive — like dead
bodies, with open, fixed eyes; here and
there one would fall on his knees as if
begging for mercy ; several whom the ex-
cess of fear made unruly were hit with hard
fists between the eyes and cowed, while
those who were hurt submitted to rough
handling, blinking rapidly without a
plaint. Faces streamed with blood ; there
were raw places on the shaven heads,
scratches, bruises, gashes. The broken
porcelain out of the chests was mostly re*
sponsible for the latter. Here and there
a Chinaman with his pig-tail unplatted
nursed a bleeding sole.

They had been ranged closely after
having been shaken into submission,
cuffed a little to allay excitement, ad-

Typhoon 157

dressed in gruff words of encouragement
that sounded like promises of evil. They
sat on the deck in ghastly, drooping rows ;
and, at the end, the carpenter, with two
hands to help him, moved from place to
place, setting taut and hitching the lines.
The boatswain, with one leg and one arm
embracing a stanchion, was busy with a
lamp pressed to his breast, trying to get
a light, and growling all the time like an
industrious gorilla. The figures of sea-
men stooped repeatedly, with the move-
ments of gleaners, and everything was
being flung into the bunker — clothing,
smashed wood, broken china, and the
dollars too, gathered up in men's jackets.
Now and then one of them would stagger
towards the doorway with his arms full of
rubbish, and rows of dolorous, slanting
eyes followed his movements.

With every roll of the ship the long
rows of Celestials would sway forward
brokenly^ and her headlong dives knocked
together the line of shaven polls from end

/

158 Typhoon

to end. When the wash of tons of watei
rolling on the deck, within reach of hia
handy died away for a moment, it seemed
to Jukes, yet quivering from his exertions,
that in his mad struggle down there he
had overcome the wind somehow ; that a
silence had fallen upon the ship, a silence
in which the sea knocked thunderously at
her sides.

Everything had been cleared out of the
'tween-deck; all the wreckage, as the
men said. They stood erect and totter-
ing, out of a multitude of heads and
drooping shoulders. Here and there a
coolie sobbed for his breath; where the
high light fell Jukes could see the salient
ribs of one, the yellow, wistful face of
another; bowed necks; or would meet a
dull stare directed at his face. He was
amazed that there had been no corpses,
but the lot of them seemed at their last
gasp, and they appeared to him more
pitiful than if they had all been dead.

Suddenly one of the coolies began to

Typhoon 159

speak. The light came and went on his
lean, straining face ; he threw his head up
like a baying hound. From the bunker
came the sounds of knocking and the
tinkle of some dollars rolling loose: he
stretched out his arm, his mouth yawned
blacky and the incomprehensible guttural
words that did not seem to belong to a
human language — the hooting, babbling
utterance of the man — startled Jukes as if
a brute had tried to be eloquent.

Grunts began to be heard about the
'tween-deck. Two more started mouth-
ing what seemed to Jukes fierce denunci-
ations. He ordered the hands out
hurriedly. He went last himself, backing
through the door, while the grunts rose
to a loud murmur and hands were ex-
tended after him as after a malefactor.
The boatswain shot the bolt and ren
marked uneasily :

''Seems as if the wind had dropped,
sir."

The men were glad to get back into

i6o Typhoon

the alleyway. Secretly each of them
thought that at the last moment he could
rush out on deck, and that was a comfort.
There is something horribly repugnant in
the idea of being drowned under a deck.
Now they had done with the Chinamen,
they again became conscious of the ship's
position.

Jukes, on coming out, found himself
up to the neck in the noisy water. He
gained the bridge and discovered he could
see shapes as if his sight had become pre-
ternaturally penetrating. He saw faint
outlines. They recalled not the familiar
aspect of the Nan-Shan^ but something
remembered — an old dismantled steamer
he had seen years ago rotting on a mud-
bank. She recalled that wreck.

There was no wind, not a breath, ex-
cept the faint currents created by the
lurches of the ship. The smoke tossed
out of the funnel was settling down upon
her deck. He breathed it as he passed
forward. He felt the deliberate throb of

Typhoon i6i

the engines and heard small sounds that
seemed to have survived the great uproar:
the knocking of broken fittings, the rapid
tumbling of some piece of wreckage on
the bridge. He traced the squat shape
of his Captain holding on to a twisted
bridge-rail, motionless, and swaying as if
rooted to the planks. The unexpected
stillness of the air oppressed him like an
overpowering wind.

"We have done it, sir," he gasped.

"Thought you would," said Captain
Mac Whirr.

"Did you?" murmured Jukes to him-
self, bitterly.

"Wind fell all at once," went on the
Captain. Jukes burst out:

"If you think it was an easy job . . ."

But his Captain, clinging to the rail,
paid no attention.

"According to the books the worst is
not over yet."

"If most of them hadn't been half
dead with seasickness and fright not one

IS

I 62 Typhoon

of us would have come out alive/' said
Jukes.

"Had to do what's fair by them/'
mumbled Mac Whirr, stolidly. **You
don't find everything in books."

"Why, I believe they would have risen
on us if I had n't ordered the hands out
of that, pretty quick," continued Jukes
with warmth.

XXI

AFTER the whisper of their shouts
their ordinary tones, so distinct,
seemed to them very loud in the amazing
stillness of the air. It seemed to tl;iem they
were talking in a dark and echoing vault.
Through a jagged aperture in the dome
of clouds the light of a few stars fell upon
the black sea, rising and falling confus-
edly with heavy splashes, all about the
ship. Sometimes the head of a watery
cone would fall on board and mingle with
the rolling flurry of foam on the swamped
deck ; and the Nan-Shan wallowed heavily
within a cistern of circular form in the
depth of the clouds resting on the sea.
This ring of dense vapours gyrating
madly around the calm of the centre en-
compassed the ship like a motionless and
unbroken wall of a blackness inconceivably

l6l

]r64 Typhoon

sinister. Within, the sea, as if agitated
by an internal commotion, leaped in
peaked mounds that jostled each other,
slipping heavily against the ship, and a
low moaning sound — the infinite plaint
of the storm's fury — came from beyond
the limits of the menacing calm. Cap-
tain MacWhifr remained silent and
Jukes's ready ear caught suddenly the
faint, long-drawn roar of some immense
wave rushing under that thick blackness
which made the appalling boundary of his
vision.

"Of course,** he started, *'they thought
we had caught at the chance to plunder
them. Of course ! You said — pick up
the money. Es^ier said than done.
They could n't tell what was in our heads.
We came in, smash! — right* into the
middle of them. Had to do it by a
rush. . . ."

**As long as it 's done,*' mumbled the
Captain, without attempting to look at
Jukes. "Had to do what 's fair.**

Typhoon 165

<<

y

We shall find yet there 's the devil to
pay when this is over," said Jukes, feel-
ing very sore, " I-et them only recover a
bit and you *11 see. They will fly at our
throats, sir. Don't forget, sir, she is n't
a British ship now. These brutes know
it well, too. The damn'd Siamese flag ! "

"We are on board all the same," re-
marked Captain Mac Whirr.

"The trouble 's not over y6t," insisted
Jukes, prophetically, reeling and catch-
ing on. "She 's a wreck," he added
iaintlv.

"The trouble *s not over yet," assented
Captain MacWhirr, half aloud. "Look
out for her a minute. ' '

"Are you going off the deck, sir?"
asked Jukes, hurriedly, as if the storm
was sure to pounce upon him as soon as
he had been left alone with the ship.

He saw her, battered and solitary, la-
bouring heavily in a wild scene of mount-
ainous black waters lit by the gleams
of distant worlds. She moved slowly.

1 66 Typhoon

breathing into the still core of the hurri«
cane the excess of her strength in a white
cloud of steam ; and the deep-toned vibra-
tion of the escape was like the defiant
trumpeting of a living creature of the sea
impatient for the renewal of the contest.
It ceased suddenly. A moan in the still-
ness of the air swooped upon Jukes's
head.

It was so plain that he looked up. He
saw the stars shining into the pit of black
vapours marking the circle of rushing
winds and headlong seas. The ship was
cut off from the peace of the earth. The
wall rose high, with smoky drifts issuing
from the inky edge that frowned upon the
ship under the patch of glittering sky.
The stars, too, seemed to look at her in.-
tently, as if for the last time, and the
cluster of their splendour sat like a dia-
dem on a lowering brow.

Captain MacWhirr had gone into the
chart-room. There was no light there,
but he could feel the disorder of tba^

, Typhoon 167

place where he used to live tidily. His
arm-chair was upset. The books had
tumbled out on the floor; he scrunched
a piece of glass under his boot. He felt
for the matches and found a box on a
shelf with a deep ledge. He struck one
and, puckering the corners of his eyes,
he held out the little flame towards the
barometer, whose glittering top of glass
and metal nodded at him continuously.

It stood very low — incredibly low — ^so
low that Captain Mac Whirr grunted. The
match went out, and hurriedly he ex-
tracted another with thick, stiff fingers.

Again a little flame burst before the
nodding glass and metal of the top. His
eyes looked at it, out of the puckers, with
attention, as if expecting a w;hisper. With
his grave face he was like a hooded and
misshapen pagan burning incense before
the oracle of a joss. There was no mis-
take. It was low.

Captain MacWhirr emitted a low
whistle. He forgot himself till the flame

1 68 T)^hoon

diminished to a blue spark, burnt hit
fingers, and vanished. Perhaps some-
thing had gone wrong with the thing?

There was an aneroid glass screwed
above the couch. He turned that way,
struck another match, and discovered th*e
white face of the instrument looking at
him from the bulkhead meaningly, not to
be gainsaid, as though the wisdom of men
were made unerring by the indifference of
matter. There was no room for doubt
now. Captain MacWhirr pshawed' at it
and threw the match down.

The worst was to come, then, and if
the books were right this worst would be
very bad. The experience of the last six
hours had enlarged his conception of what
heavy weather could be like. "It'll be
terrific," he pronounced mentally. He
had not consciously looked at anything
by the light of the matches but the
barometer, and yet spmehow he had seen
that the water-bottle and glass had been
flung out of their stand. It seemed to

/

Typhoon 169

give him a more intimate knowledge of
the tossing the ship had gone through.
"I would n't have believed it," he
thought. And his table had been cleared
too ; his rulers, his pencils, the inkstand,
— all the things that had their safe, ap-
pointed places, — ^they were gone from
them as if a mischievous hand had
plucked them out and flung them on the
wet floor. The hurricane had broken in
upon the orderly arrangements of his
privacy. This had never happened before
and the dismay reached the very seat of
his composure. And the worst was com-
ing yet ! He was glad the trouble in the
'tween-deck had been discovered in time.
If she had to go after all, then at least she
would n't be going with a lot of people in
her fighting tooth and claw. That would
have been odious. And in that feeling
there was a humane intention and a vague
sense of the fitness of things.

These instantaneous thoughts were yet
in their essence heavy and slow, partaking

1 70 Typhoon

of the nature of the man. He extended
his hand to put back the match-box in its
corner of the shelf. There were always
matches there — by order. The steward
had his instructions impressed upon him.
**A box — ^just there, see? Not so very
full — where I can put my hand on it,
steward. Might want a light in a hurry.
Can't tell on board ship what you might
want in a hurry. Mind now.''

And, of course, on his side he would be
careful to put it back scrupulously. He
did so now, but before he removed h's
hand it occurred to him that perhaps he
would never have occasion to use that
box again. The vividness of the notion
checked him, and for an infinitesimal
fraction of a second his fingers closed
again on the small object. This man, dis-
turbed by a storm, hung on to a match-
box absurdly, as though it had been a
symbol of all those habits that make
mainfest the reality of life. He released
it at last, and, letting himself fall on the

Typhoon 171

settee, listened for the first sounds of re-
turning wind.

Not yet. He heard only the wash of
water, the heavy splashes and the dull
shocks of the confused seas boarding his
ship from all sides. She would never
have a chance to clear her decks.

XXII

THIS quietude of the air was startlingly
tense and unsafe, like a slender hair
holding a sword suspended over his head.
By this awful pause the storm penetrated
the defences of the man and unsealed bis
lips. He spoke out in the solitude and
the pitch-darkness of the cabin, as if ad-
dressing another being awakened into a
stir of life within his breast.

''I should n't like to lose her/' he said,
half aloud.

He sat unseen, apart from the sea, from

his ship, isolated, as if withdrawn from

the very current of his own existence,

where such freaks as talking to himself

surely had no place. His palms reposed

on his knees, he bowed his bull-neck and

breathed heavily, surrendering to a

strange sensation of weariness, but was

17a

Typhoon 1 73

not enlightened enough to recognise in it
the fatigue of mental stress.

From where he sat he could reach the
door of a wash-stand locker. There
should have been a towel there. There
was. Good! He wiped his face, theii
went on rubbing his wet head. He tow-
elled himself with energy in the dark, and
then sat still with the towel on his knees.
A moment passed in which one could not
have known there was a man sitting in
that cabin. Then a murmur arose.
**She may come out of it yet."
When Captain Mac Whirr came out on
deck, which he did brusquely, as though
he had suddenly become conscious of
having stayed away too long, the calm
had lasted already more than fifteen min-
utes — long enough to make itself intoler-
able even to his imagination. Jukes,
motionless on the forepart of the bridge,
began to speak at once. His voice, blank
and forced, as though he were talking
through hard-set teeth, seemed to spread

174 Typhoon

out on all sides into the darkness, deep*

ening again upon the confused unrest of

the sea.
''I had the wheel relieved. Hackett

began to call he was done. He 's lying

in there alongside the steering-gear with

a face like death. At first I could n't get

anybody to crawl out. That bo's'n 's

worse than no good, I always said.

Thought I would have had to go myself

and haul out one of them by the neck.''

"Ah, well!" muttered the Captain.
He stood watchful by Jukes's side.

**The second mate's in there, too,
holding his head. Is he hurt, sir? "

"No, crazy," said Captain MacWhirr^
with decision.

"Looks as if he had had a tumble,
though."

"I had to give him a push," explained
the Captain.

Jukes gave an impatient sigh.

"It will come very sudden," said Cap.
tain Mac Whirr, * 'and from over there, I

Typhoon 1 75

fancy. God only knows, though. These
books are only good to muddle your head
and make you jumpy. It will be bad,
and there 's an end. If we only can
steam her round in time to meet it I . . . "

A minute passed. Some of the stars
winked rapidly and went out.

"You left them pretty safe? " began the
Captain abruptly, as though the silence
were unbearable.

"Are you thinking of the coolies, sir?
I figged life-lines all ways across that
'tween-deck. "

"Did you? Good idea, Mr. Jukes."

"I did n't — think you cared to — know,"
said Jukes, — the lurching of the ship cut
his speech as though somebody had been
jerking him around while he talked, —
"how I got on with — that infernal job.
We did it. And it may not matter in the
end."

"Had to do what 's fair, for all — they
are only Chinamen. Give them the same
chance with ourselves — hang it all ! She

1 76 T)rphoon ^

isn't lost yet. Bad enough to be shut
up — below in a gale '*

"That *s what I thought when you gave
me the job, sir/' interjected Jukes,
moodily.

" — without being battered to pieces,"
pursued Captain MacWhirr, with rising
vehemence. "Could n't let that go on in
my ship if I knew she had n't five min-
utes to live. Could n't bear it, Mr.
Jukes."

A hollow, rolling noise, like that of a
shout echoing in a rocky chasm, ap-
proached the ship and went away again.
-*' The last star, blurred, enlarged, as if turn-
ing into the fiery mist of its beginning,
struggled with the colossal depth of black-
ness hanging over the ship — and went
out.

"Now for it! " muttered Captain Mac-
Whirr. "Mr. Jukes."

"Here, sir."

The two men were growing indistinct
to each other. The gathering darkness

Typhoon 177

embraced, absorbed their erect figures
into the opaque gloom.

"We must trust her to go through and
come out on the other side. That 's
plain and straight. There 's no room for
Captain Wilson's storm-strategy here."

"No. sir."

"She will be smothered and swept
again for hours/' mumbled the Captain.
"There's not much left ab<)ve deck for
the sea to take away — unless you or me.**

"Both, sir?" whispered Jukes, breath
lessly.

"You are always meeting trouble half
way, Jukes," Captain Mac Whirr remon.
strated, quaintly. "Though it 's a fact
that the second mate is no good. D' ye
hear, Mr. Jukes? You would be left
alone if **

Captain MacWhirr interrupted himself,
and Jukes, glancing on all sides, re.
mained silent.

"Don't you be put out by anything,"
the Captain continued^ mumbling rather

1 78 Typhoon

fast. "Keep her facing it. They may
say what they like, but the heaviest seas
run with the wind. Facing it — always
facing it — that 's the way to get through.
You are a young sailor. Face it. That 's
enough work for any man. Keep a cool
head."

"Yes, sir," said Jukes, with a flutter of
the heart. In the next few seconds the
Captain spoke to the engine-room and got
an answer. For some reason Jukes ex-
perienced an access of confidence, a thing
that came from outside like a warm
breath and made him feel equal to every
demand. The distant muttering of the
darkness stole into his ears. He noted it
unmoved, out of that sudden belief in
himself, as a man in a shirt of mail would
watch a point.

The ship laboured without intermission
amongst the black hills of water, paying
with this hard tumbling the price of her
life. She rumbled in her depths, shaking
a white plummet of steam into the night.

Typhoon 1 79

and Jukes*s thought darted like a skim*
ming bird through the engine-room where
Mr. Rout — good man — was ready. When

the rumbling ceased it seemed to him that

«

there was a pause of every sound, a dead
pause, in which Captain MacWhirr's
voice rang out startlingly.

"What's that? A puff ? *' It spoke
much louder than Jukes had ever heard it
before. "On the bow? That's right.
She may come out of it yet."

The mutter of the winds drew near
apace. In the forefront could be distin-
guished a drowsy, waking plaint passing
on — and far off the growth of a multi-
ple clamour, marching and expanding.
There was the throb as of. many drums in
it, a vicious, rushing note, and like the
chant of a tramping multitude.

Jukes could no longer see his Captain
distinctly. The darkness was absolutely
piling itself up upon the ship. At most
he made out movements, a hint of elbows
spread out, of a head thrown up. Captain

i8o Typhoon

btfffof

MacWhirr was trying to do up the top
on of his coat with unwonted haste.
The hurricane that has the power to mad-
den the seas, to sink ships, to uproot,
trees, to overturn strong walls, and dash
the very birds of the air to the, ground
had found this taciturn man in its path
and, doing its utmost, had managed to
make him loquacious. Before the re-
newed wrath of the winds swooped on the
ship, Captain MacWhirr found time to
declare, in a tone of vexation as it were :
••I would n't like to lose her."
He was spared that annoyance.

XXIII

WHEN the Nan-Shan came to an
anchor the sunshine was bright,
the breeze fresh. She came in from a
green, hard sea, green like a furrowed
slab of jade, streaked and splashed with
frosted silver. Even before her story got
about, her arrival was noticed on shore
and the seamen in harbour said: ''Look!
Look at that steamer. What 's that?
Siamese — is n't she? Just look at her."
She seemed indeed to have served as a
target for the secondary batteries of a
whole fleet. A hail of shells could not
have given her upper works a more
broken, torn, and devastated aspect ; and
she had about her the worn, weary air of
ships coming from the far ends of the
world — and, indeed, with truth, for in
her short passage she had been very far,

iSi

1 82 Typhoon

sighting, verily, even the coast of the
Great Beyond, whence no ship ever re-
turns to give up her crew to the dust of
the earth* She was incrusted and g^rey
with salt to the trucks of her masts and to
the top of her funnel; as though, as some
facetious seaman said, "the crowd on
board had fished her out somewhere from
the bottom of the sea and brought her in
here for salvage. ' ' And further, excited
by the felicity of his own wit, he offered
to give five pounds for her — "as she
stands.*'

Before she had been quite an hour at
rest a meagre little man, with a red-tipped
nose and a face cast in an angry mould,
landed from a sampan on the quay of the
Foreign Concession and incontinently
turned to shake his fist at her. A tall
individual with legs much too thin for a
rotund stomach, and with watery eyes,
strolled up and remarked :

"Just left her— eh? Quick work."
He wore a soiled suit of blue flannel,

Typhoon 183

with a pair of dirty cricketing shoes; a
dingy grey moustache drooped from his lip,
and daylight could be seen in two places
between the rim and the crown of his hat.

"Hallo! What are you doing here?*'
asked the ex-second mate of the Nan^
Shan^ shaking hands hurriedly.

"Standing by — chance worth taking —
got a quiet hint/* explained the man with
the broken hat, in hollow, apathetic
wheezes.

The second shook his fist again at the
ship.

"There's a fellow there that ain't fit
to have charge of a scow," he declared,
quivering with passion, while the other
looked about listlessly.

"Is there?"

But he caught sight on the quay of a
heavy seaman's chest, painted brown
under a fringed sailcloth cover, and lashed
with new manila line. He eyed it with
pensive interest.

"I would talk and raise trouble if )b

1 84 Typhoon

wasn't for that damned Siamese flag.
Nobody to go to — or I would make it hot

for him, the fraud! Told his chief —

«

that 's another fraud for you — I had lost
my nerve. The greatest lot of ignorant
fools that ever sailed the seas ! No ! You
can't think . . ."

"Got your money all right? " inquired
his seedy acquaintance, suddenly.

"Yes. Paid me off on board/' raged
the second mate. " 'Get your breakfast
on shore/ says he."

"Mean skunk!" commented the tall
man, vaguely, and passed his tongue on
his lips. "What about having a drink
of some sort?"

"He struck me," hissed the second
mate.

"No! You don't say!" The man in
blue began to bustle about exceedingly.
"Can't possibly talk here. I want to
know all about it. Struck — eh? Let's
get a fellow for your chest. I know a
quiet place."

Typhoon 185

Mr. Jukes, who had been scanning the
shore through a pair of glasses, informed
the chief engineer afterwards that "our
late second mate hasn't been long in
finding a friend. A chap looking uncom-
monly like a bummer. I saw them walk
away together from the quay."

The hammering and banging of the
needful repairs did not disturb Captain
MacWhirr. The steward found, in the
letter he wrote in a tidy chart-room, pas-
sages of such absorbing interest that twice
he was nearly caught in the act ; but Mrs»
MacWhirr, in the drawing-room of the
forty-pound house, stifled a yawn — per-
haps out of self-respect. For she was
alone.

She reclined in a plush-bottomed and
gilt hammock-chair, near a tiled fireplace,
with Japanese fans on the mantel and a
glow of coals in the grate. Lifting her
hands from time to time she glanced
wearily here and there into the many
pages. It was not her fault they were so

1 86 Typhoon

prosy, so completely uninteresting — from
"My darling wife" at the beginning to
"Your loving husband " at the end. She
could n*t be really expected to understand
all these ship affairs. She was glad, of
course, to hear from him, but she had
never asked herself why, precisely. **. . •
They are called typhoons . . . not
in books. . . . The mate did not
seem to like it . . . could n't think
of letting it go on. . . ."

She rustled the pages. ". . . A
calm that lasted over twenty minutes,"
she read perfunctorily, and the next
words her thoughtless eyes caught on the
top of an other page were, " . . . see you
and the children again. • • /' He
was always thinking of coming home.
He had never had such a good salary.

It did not occur to her to turn back
over the leaf to look. She would have
found it recorded there that between 4
and 6 A.M., on the 25th of December,
Captain Mac Whirr did actually think that

Typhoon 187

his ship could not possibly live in such a
sea, and that he would never see his wife
and children again. Nobody was to know
this (his letters got mislaid and lost so
often) — nobody but the steward, who had
been greatly impressed by that disclosure ;
so much so, that he risked trying to give
the cook some idea of the "narrow squeak
we all had" by saying solemnly, "The
old man himself had a damn poor opinion
of our chance." "How do you know? "
contemptuously asked the cook — an old
soldier. " He has n't told you, maybe? "
"Well, he did drop something," the
steward stammered. "Get along with
you ! He will be coming to tell me next,"
jeered the old cook over his shoulder.

Mrs. MacWhirr glanced farther, on the
alert. ", . . do what 's fair. . • .
miserable objects. . . . Only three,
with a broken leg each, and one . . .
Thought had better keep the matter quiet
. . • hope to have done the fair
thing. . • .'•

1 88 Typhoon

She let her hands fall. No. There
was nothing about coming home. Must
have been expressing merely a pious
wish. Mrs. MacWhirr's mind was at
ease, and a black marble clock, priced
by the local jeweller at £3 iSs. td.^ had
a discreet, stealthy tick. " —

The door flew open and a girl in the
long-legged, short-frocked period of exis-
tence flung into the room. A lot of
colourless, rather lanky hair was scattered
over her shoulders. Seeing her mother,
she stood still and directed her pale, pry^
ing eyes upon the letter.

"From father," murmured Mrs. Mac-
Whirr. "What have you done with your
ribbon?"

The girl put her hands up and pouted.

"He's well," continued Mrs. Mac-
Whirr, languidly. "At least, I think so.
He never says." She had a little laugh.
The girl's face expressed a blank, wander,
ing indifference, and Mrs. Mac Whirr sur
veyed her with fond pride.

Typhoon 189

*' Go and get your hat," she said after
a while. '^I am going out to do some
shopping. There is a sale at Linom's.'"

*'0h, how jolly!" uttered the child,
impressively, in unexpectedly grave
vibrating tones, and bounded out.

XXIV

THE afternoon was fine; the sidewalks
were dry. Outside the draper's,
Mrs. Mac Whirr smiled upon a woman in
a black mantle of generous proportions,
armoured in jet, ornate with flowers
blooming falsely above a bilious matronly
countenance. They broke into a swift
little babble of greetings and exclama-
tions both together, very hurried, as if
the street were ready to yawn open and
swallow all that pleasure before it could
be adequately voiced.

Behind them the high glass doors were
kept on the swing, people could n't pass,
men stood aside waiting patiently, and
Lydia was absorbed in poking the end of
her parasol between the stone flags. Mrs.
Mac Whirr talked rapidly.

*' Thank you so much! This very day.

190

Typhoon 191

He 's not coming home yet. Of course,
it 's very sad to have him away, but it 's
such a comfort to know he keeps so
well!" Mrs. Mac Whirr drew breath:
*'The climate there agrees with him,"
she added, beamingly, as if poor Mac-
Whirr had been away touring in China
for the sake of his health.

Neither was the chief engineer coming
home yet. Mr. Rout knew too well the
Value of a good billet.

** Solomon says wonders will never
cease," cried Mrs. Rout, joyously, at the
old lady in her arm-chair by the fire.
Mr. Rout's mother moved slightly her
withered hands lying in black half-mittens
on her lap.

The engineer's wife's eyes fairly danced
on the paper.

'"That Captain of the ship he is in — a
rather simple man — you remember,
mother? — has done something rather
clever, Solomon says."

"Yes, my dear," said the old woman

'"^

192 Typhoon

meekly, sitting with bowed silvery head,
and that air of still, far-away meditation
only very old people have, as if absorbed
in nursing the last flickers of life, "I think
I remember."

Solomon, Old Sol, Father Sol, The
Chief, "Rout, good man — " Mr. Rout,
the austere and paternal friend of youth,
had been the baby of her many children
— all dead now. And she remembered
him best as a boy of ten — before he went
away to serve his time in some great en-
gineering works in the North. She had
seen so little of him since ; she had gone
through so many years that she had now
to retrace her steps to meet him again in
the mist of time. Sometimes it seemed
as if her daughter-in-law were talking of
some strange man.

Mrs. Rout, junior, was disappointed.

H'm, b'm." She turned the page.

How provoking! He does n*t say what
it is. Says I could n't understand how
much there was in it. Fancy! What

4<

Typhoon 193

could it be, so very clever? What a
wretched man not to tell us! "

She read on without further remark,
soberly, and at last sat looking silently
into the fire. The Chief wrote just a
word or two about the typhoon, but
something had moved him to express his
growing desire for the companionship of
the jolly woman. ''If it hadn't been
that mother must be looked after, I
would send you your passage money to-
day. You could set up a small house out
here. I could see you sometimes then.
We are not growing younger. • . ."

"He's well, mother," sighed Mrs.
Rout, rousing herself.

"He always was a strong, healthy boy,"
said the old. woman, placidly.

But it was Mr. Jukes's account that was
really animated and interesting. His
friend in the Western ocean trade im-
parted it freely to the other officers. * ' A
chap I know writes to me about an extra-
ordinary affair that happened on board

IS

J 94 Typhoon

his ship in that typhoon — jrou know — ^that
was in the papers two months ago. It *s
the funniest thing. Just see for your-
self what he says. I *I1 show ycu his
letter."

There were phrases in it calculated to
give the impression of light-hearted in-
domitable resolution. Jukes had written
them in good faith, for he felt thus when
he wrote. He described with likrid effect
the scenes in th^ 'tween-deck. *'. « .
It struck me in a flash that those con-
founded Chinamen could n't tell we
weren't a desperate kind of robbers.
' T is n't good to part the Chinaman from
his money if he is the stronger party.
We need have been desperate indeed to
go thieving in such weather, but what
could these beggars know of us? So,
without thinking of it twice, I got the
hands away in a jiffy. Our work was
done — ^that the old man had set his heart
about. We cleared out without staying
to inquire how they felt. I am convinced

Typhoon 195

that if they had not been so unmercilully
shaken, and afraid — each individual one
of them — to stand up, we would have
been torn to pieces. Oh! it was pretty
complete, I can tell you; and you may
run to and fro across the pond to the end
of time before you find yourself with such
a job in your hands. ' '

After this he alluded professionally to
the damage done to the ship and went on
thus:

"It was when the weather quieted
down that the situation became con-
foundedly delicate. It was n't made any
better by us having been lately trans-
ferred to the Siamese flag; though the
skipper can't see that it makes any differ-
ence — 'as long as we are on board/ he
saya. There are feelings that this man
simply has n't got — and there 's an end
of it. You might just as well try to make
a bedpost understand. But apart from
this, it is an infernally lonely state for a
ship to be going about in the China seas

10 Typhoon

with no proper Consuls, not even a gun*
boat of her own anywhere — not a body to
go to in case of any trouble.

"My notion was to keep them under
hatches another fifteen hours or so; we
were n't much farther than that from
Fu-chau. We would find there most likely
some sort of a man-of-war, and once
under her guns we were safe enough, for
surely any skipper of a man-of-war,
English, French, or Dutch, would see
white men through as far as a row on
board goes. We could get rid of them
and their money by delivering them to
their Mandarins or Two-tail, or whatever
they call these chaps in goggles you see
being carried in sedan chairs about their
stinking streets.

"'The old man wouldn't see it, some-
how. He wanted to keep the matter
quiet. He got that notion into his head
and a steam windlass could n't drag it out
of him. He wanted as little fuss made as
potoible^ 'for the sake of the ship's name

Typhoon 197

and the owners, for the sake of all con-
cerned/ says he, looking at me very hard.
It made me angry, hot. Of course you
could n't keep a thing like that quiet, but
the chests had been secured in the usual
manner, and were safe enough for any
earthly gale, but this had been an alto-
gether fiendish business I couldn't give
you even an idea of.

"Meantime I could hardly keep on my
feet. None of us had had a spell of any
sort for nearly thirty hours, and there he
sat rubbing his chin, rubbing the top of
his head, and so bothered he did n't even
think of taking his long boots off.

" *I hope, sir,* says I, 'you won't be
letting them out on deck before we make
ready for them in some shape or other '
Not, mind you, that I felt very sanguine
about controlling if they took charge.
Trouble with a cargo of Chinamen is no
child's play; I was dam' tired, too. 'I
wish,' said I, 'we could throw the whole
lot of these dollars down to them and let

198 Typhoon

them fight it out amongst themselves^
while we get a rest. '

" 'Now you talk wild, Jukes/ says he,
looking up in his slow way, that makes
you ache all over, somehow. 'We must
plan out something that would be fair to
all parties,*

XXV

" I HAD no end of work on hand, and

i by-and-by I set the hands going,
and then I thought I would turn in a bit.
I had n't been in my bunk ten minutes
when in rushes the steward and begins to
pull at my leg.

** 'For God's sake> Mr. Jukes, come
out ! Come on deck, quick, sir ! Oh, do
come out ! '

"The fellow scared all the sense out of
me. I did n't know what had happened
— another hurricane, or what. Could hear
no wind.

** 'The Captain 's letting them out.
Oh, he is letting them out! Jump on
deck, sir, and save us. The chief
engineer has just run below for his
revolver. *

"That 's what the fool made me under-

199

200 Typhoon

stand. However, Father Rout swears he
went in there to get a clean pocket*hand«
kerchief. Anyhow, I made one jump
into my trousers and flew on deck aft.
There was certainly a good deal of noise
going on where I could n't see forward
of the bridge. Four of the hands with
the bo's*n were at work abaft. I passed
up to them through the sky-light some
of the rifles all the ships on the China
coast carry in the cabin and led them on
the bridge. On .the way I ran against
Old Sol, looking startled and sucking at
an unlighted cigar. 'Come along!' I
shouted to him.

"We charged, seven of us, up to the
chart-room. All was over. There was
the old man, with his sea-boots still
drawn up to the hips and in shirt-sleeves
— got warm thinking it out, I suppose.
Bun Lim's dandy clerk stood at his el-
bow, as dirty as a sweep and still green in
the face. I could see directly I was in for
something.

Typhoon 201

•* 'What the devil are these monkey
tricks, Mr. Jukes? ' asks the old man, as
angry as ever he could* be. I tell you
frankly it made me lose my tongue.

*' 'For God's sake, Mr, Jukes/ says he,
Mo take away these rifles from the men.
Somebody 's sure to get shot before long
if you don*t. Damme, if this ship is n't
worse than Bedlam! Look sharp, now!
I want you up here to help me and Bun
Lim's Chinaman to count that money.
You would n't mind lending a hand, too,
Mr. Rout, now you are here? The more
of us the better.'

"He had settled it all while | was hav-
ing a snooze. Had we been an English
ship, or only going to land our cargo of
coolies in an English port like Hong-
Kong; for instance, there would have
been no end of inquiries and bother,
xlaims for damages, and so on. But these
Chinamen know their officials better than
we do.

'*The old man had the hatches taken

Z02 Typhoon

off, and they were all on deck after a
night and a day down below. It made
you feel queer to see so many gaunt» wild
faces together. The beggars were staring
at the sky, at the sea, at the. ship, as
though they had expected the whole thing
to have been blown to pieces. And no
wonder. They had had a doing that would
have shaken the soul out of a white man.
But then they say a Chinaman has no
soul. He has, though, something about
him that is deuced tough. There was a
fellow (amongst others of the badly hurt)
who had had his eye all biut knocked out.
It stood out of his head awful swollen, like
half a hen's egg. This would have laid a
white man on his back; and there was
that chap elbowing here and there and
talking to the others as if nothing was the
matter. They made a great hubbub
amongst themselves, and whenever the
old man showed his bald head on the fore-
side of the bridge, they would all leave off
and look at him.

1

i

Typhoon 203

''After he had done his thinking he
made that Bun Lim's fellow go down and
explain to them how they could get their
money. He told me afterwards that all
the coolies having worked in the same
place and for the same length of time, he
reckoned he would be doing the fair thing
by them as near as possible if he dis-
tributed all we had picked up equally
among the lot. You could n't tell one
man's dollars from another's, and if you
asked each man he was afraid they would
lie and he would find himself a long way
short. I think he was right there. As to
giving up the cash into the hands of any
Chinese official he could scare up in
Fu-chau, he said he might just as well
put the money in his pocket at once for
all the good it would be to them. I sup-
pose they thought so too.

"We finished the distribution before
dark. It was rather a sight : the sea run-
ning high, the ship a wreck to look at,
these Chinamen staggering on the bridge

ao4 Typhoon

one by one for their share ; and the old
man, still booted and in his shirt-sleeves,
solemnly busy paying out, perspiring like
anything, and now and then coming down
sharp on myself or Father Rout about one
thing or another not quite to his mind.
He himself took the share of these who
were disabled to them on the No. z
hatch. There were three dollars left over,
and these went to the three most damaged
coolies— one to each. We.tumed to after-
wards and shovelled out on deck heaps of
wet rags, all sorts of fragments of things
without shape, and that you could n't
give a name to, and let them settle the
ownership themselves.

"This certainly is coming as near as can
be to keeping the thing quiet for the bene-
fit of all concerned. What 's your opinion,
you pampered Mail-boat swell? The old
Chief says that this was plainly the only
thing that could be done. The skipper
remarked to me the other day, 'These are
things you find nothing about in books.'

#
>

n

I

i

Typhoon 205

I think that he had not done badly for
such a stupid man. • • •"

THE END

1' n'i^f 9 ■; "^0'^

ir'kT'^

COUNTRY LIFE FSE8S
GAXDZN OTY, N. Y.